I want to preface this by saying that I have, as of the past half year or so, basically ditched most social media. To be honest, I wasn't particularly attached to a lot of it; but I had accounts, used them from time to time(albeit casually), and eventually just got tired of them.
I was never into Tiktok, I felt that Snapchat and especially Instagram were pretty stupid and vanity-chasing nowadays, though I think IG was alright at the start when I used it to follow artist friends of mine, and actually managed to FIND stuff like cool artists and cool photography, but it turned into a reel-soaked vanity mine that made me feel like a disconnected alien, so I ditched it. (I could never fathom why people would need to show so much of their lives, doing whatever, with whoever, or whatnot, but millions of people like to do it so I guess I'll never get it.) Twitter I ditched for obvious reasons(I didn't delete, but I locked and basically let it gather dust), and anything else is just...whatever, I never really needed it.
Basically I have a F&F Facebook since a bunch of my US family uses it(and I basically have to know you to add you), Bluesky, and I do use Reddit, but I consider that almost *close* to a message board, since one can at least sorta just post to communities that one cares about.
FB features those reels, too; luckily a lot of my friends that use them don't really use them like the majority on the other sites do.
So what is tonight's cloud-yelling about? How I notice reels just made so many things, especially concert stuff, so freaking boring and samey now. This was mostly brought on looking at some cool old pictures(like, actual photographs) of some 1990s gigs online, as well as watching some old video(as in, camcorder footage) of some old gigs.
All of those were so exciting to watch! I thought getting to see the time Megadeth played Lepakko here in 1988(a small club that used to be popular, the building was torn down in...'99 or so?) was really cool. And the quality was pretty damn good for a camcorder; I imagine the person recording it was *probably* with a magazine or publication at the time. I also saw footage of a 1996 Satyricon gig from Belgium, likewise taken from the side of the stage. Again, really nice quality for what it was!
Then I started to get nostalgic for Tuska 2006(yeah, almost 20 years ago now), when Celtic Frost played; the gig was fantastic, and I managed to find a few videos of it-not too many, though, as iPhones weren't actually out yet at the time, so this was likely taken with a digital camera or mini-DV. Not the best quality, but nonetheless, cool to look at.
While I did all of this, I started asking myself "Damn, if these were on now, I could have my absolute pick of footage. Like, I could have footage out the ass. I can call up concert footage even on Youtube, let alone the other sites, from the past few years and get my pick of a hundred different smartphones."
And then I realized like-this may well be why so many of them are boring now. I love having a nice professionally shot concert to watch, but the glut of everything else just...oversaturated things.
At any given gig, 99% of the crowd has a smartphone, and of those people, at least half are filming a whole bunch of footage from the gig. Mostly from the start and end, sometimes from the middle, etc, etc. The day after a recent concert, I had my pick of a few songs that were uploaded overnight.
And I was...barely interested in it.
So...what happened?
I feel like footage back then was taken with more consideration? More care? Like, usually when I'd take gig pictures with press, I'd take a few of the first 2 or 3 songs, and *maybe* a video. I was lucky, I got to use a proper digicam. Others only got to use a disposable camera, which for a lot of places was the only allowed format if you weren't press. (Some places allowed digital cameras, so long as you didn't have a zoom lens.)
Thinking more about it, I'm going to set up a scenario of BobTheMetalGuy, both a 2002 member of a message board, and a 2023 member of whatever social media, to try to explain why I feel like reels and such got mega boring.
In 2002, BobTheMetalGuy is going to a gig in Philadelphia(we'll use Philly since I used to live there.) So, in those days, again, there were a couple of choices. Digital cameras or disposable cameras. The former were definitely more convenient-but still limited. They didn't take *the worlds best* pictures, they had limited space(a large card in 2002 was sixty-four of god's own megabytes, 32s or even 16s were more common), and you had to transfer them, pick out the best ones and so on. Video? Only if you had 32 or 64.
Disposable cameras net you roughly 24 pictures, and you had to get them developed the next day(luckily most drugstores had one-hour service.) You didn't even KNOW how well they turned out until after the fact.
Your whole night-including any pregame with the crew, post-game with the crew, band pictures, AND concert photos-were basically at the whim of this space. So BobTheMetalhead is gonna make damn sure that the ones he takes counts. Thought and care are put into them.
Now keep in mind, at a typical gig, not everyone is gonna have these. Maybe a handful of people. And out of this handful of people-not everyone necessarily ran in the same circles! Maybe one of Bob's RL friends belongs to this message board, but that's it. And they might not even be taking pictures. It could be the other 30 people at the gig with cameras don't belong to this particular community, so will be posting their pictures elsewhere-or not at all, maybe keeping them.
So Bob gets done the gig, gets some good photos, and decides to post them to the message board. There's some really cool ones, and everyone gets to see pictures of a gig they weren't at. Maybe he has a digital camera, and the band played a song they usually don't, so people get a 30 second clip of it! It's pretty freaking cool. Later on, some professional video of the gig comes out, and that's cool too-but Bob's pictures are still, in a sense, one of a kind.
And this happens for other cities; but even then, it's something different. One of Bob's message board friends, Abyss Fracture(we'll go with that name) posted some really neat front-row pics from the LA gig, and another person neither of them know managed to get a rather excellent top-down view of the drummer from the Chicago gig.
There's pictures, the pictures were shared, and they're online; they aren't locked to the forums itself or anything. These pictures are freely available for anyone to look at, as are the videos. And they're probably still around even later. The video might get uploaded to Youtube 3 years later, even, as a short video! The pictures were discussed and shared in a community.
Now, we'll go into 2023 Bob, and we'll compare the two.
Bob, like everyone, has a smartphone. About 99% of the people at the gig he's going to has a smartphone, too. He really doesn't have to be careful what he films; he films a ton of the pregame(and uploads it instantly to his reels), and at the gig, he, along with 1/3 of the audience, watches a good portion of the gig through their phones-not all, no, but a lot-and uploads it pretty much instantly to whatever sites he's uploading too. As does everyone else. And then he films a bunch of the post-game(uploading it), so a bunch of strangers who might be looking for a little gig footage-perhaps they couldn't make it-ends up getting a bunch of reels and clips of people they don't know going to a bar because of the algorithms.
Maybe I'm sounding a little scathing and biased here; I can't lie, I AM biased. This is what it feels like.
Instead of some nicely thought-out pictures and maybe a video, we get a ton of the same gig, in the same city, of some of the same songs(maybe some mixing up there, sure, but definitely the intro and the encores), at maybe slightly different angles depending on where whatever uploader was standing. These videos are all shown to a bunch of strangers, rather than a community, and the posts on said reels and whatnot are all impersonal emojis.
I'll try to be fair here. I try, when possible, to look at the good in things. So I try to look for advantages where I can, and that goes for things that I'm not particularly a big fan of.
Nowadays, getting a lot of high quality video of a gig CAN be cool! Maybe if you can't make it, it's nice to be able to see. Granted, a lot of the coolest videos still end up coming from the professionals who can get the stage shots and everything, but yeah, it's pretty cool to be able to see gigs you missed. Also, having better quality of things is nice, too, and sometimes, having more of it is beneficial. When your only footage of a gig is a grainy video, or a video from someone who, say, never films the drummer or keyboardist or something, then it can make you kinda yearn to be able to see them, and being able to maybe call up another video or set of reels that DOES do this is kind of nice. I can even use the example above of that awesome 1996 Satyricon gig; that band is known for having one of the most proficient, fastest drummers in black metal, and the camera person didn't film him nearly enough, if I had to nitpick. I'm still grateful I got to see that gig, but yeah, if I had to pick an advantage of the 'Modern Times', the fact that you get more footage means you might, possibly, end up with some better footage.
And hell, not ALL reels are just mindless oversaturated drivel. I mean, if, say, Metallica(just to throw a band out there) posts a few behind the scenes reels for their fans of them heading to the studio, or heading to a city, that's pretty cool? It reminds me of footage you'd find on an old tour video, the only difference being you'd have to wait for the tour video or DVD to come out.(Back then, that was how we got the behind the scenes tour and studio stuff.) In this case, I'm not bothered by it and even think it's cool. Fans like getting inside peeks and the studio and tours-it's just they can get them a little sooner now. These reels and such have a purpose. Same thing for when a friend of mine takes a trip overseas to see a festival, and makes an album out of it to share on their F&F Facebook or something. That's got some purpose, I think, when you at least share to your circles. And sure, some of these include those pre and postgame, some overseas food and the like.
Essentially, I think the format can be used "for good". Like many, many things in the world, the actual tech itself is just...neutral. It's there. It's not good or bad. It's how it's used, as always. I've seen Youtube Shorts used for good(I love ones that deal with cute animals and follow a few), and for the boring(a million and one reels of the same thing.)
But I think, here, the cons outweigh the pros at the end. I can almost feel that the reels are 'soulless' in a sense; they're just done to post material online. While Bob may not care about getting a ton of followers or anything like that, these hundreds of reels just feel...posted. Very little discussion(if any, since often reels don't allow them, at least some pictures that get posted to, say, FB or something allows for some discussion about them), just...content.
Content. There's that word.
That cursed(in a bad way, not in a cool hellfire kinda way) word.
"Information made available by a website or other electronic medium." Even the definition of the word has a new addendum, now, to discuss online content.
People LOVE uploading content.
Uploads nowadays just feel like...content. That's the best possible way I can think to explain it. When I watched those videos I mentioned above, they didn't feel like "content." They felt like neat views into the time period, concerts that I didn't get a chance to see, and the photos felt like cool things posted to a community to share them with others and spark discussion about stuff. And sure, we all liked to show off JUST a little if we met the band! (After awhile working press, and moving overseas, it became pretty common for me to do that, so it was like, Just Another Night, but I know people liked to see the pictures, so I posted them.) And I'll post a picture of the gang together at a bar or something(to my F&F FB, which...just basically involves the people I was with.)
I think we're ALL, in modern days, guilty of uploading 'content' now and again. You could argue this rambling blog of mine is content under a modern definition. I don't like using the word for thought-out things, though.
And this rambling brings me back to why those reels always feel so soulless; they're just recorded, uploaded, rinse and repeat. Why? I guess millions of people just really like uploading stuff. There's endless reasons why. Maybe it's because it's "the thing to do" now. It's just...*normal* to do so.
This is maybe why it lost me and why I started feeling so disconnected to a lot of modern social media. The "this is just how it is" aspect. I already will never understand why people want to show off so much of their lives online(look, if it makes you happy, you do you, find happy where you can get it in this world, but I will never understand why), and now I just don't understand why, for example, you'd wait so long for a gig just to watch it through your phone. Again, by all means snap a few good pics and a video for memories! We've been doing that for decades. But does it ALL need uploading instantly? Do you need to watch the entire gig through your phone?
And hell, imagine being the band. Imagine being onstage and just looking at a sea of phones instead of feeding off the crowd energy. I really don't blame Ghost for banning phones from their gigs(though I do think medical use should be allowed, of course-smartphones do have necessary medical uses, so they should be allowed to *exist* at gigs.)
I kinda miss having a little bit of friction or inconvenience is all. I really didn't mind waiting until the next day to do my uploads(and who knows, maybe even nowadays with a smartphone I'll practice patience myself before uploading a few pics to my friends, just because I can.) I know I missed not knowing everything that everyone was doing-that's why I ditched a lot of social media. I was able to get rid of that.
I know I'm preaching to the choir when I say I feel like people have been changed by this; I've seen it firsthand. I guess what I'm saying is maybe take a chance. Take a few good pictures of a gig(I think rarer gigs are pretty cool to take more of?). Take one video. Maybe even two, if you get a rare song or a killer encore. But wait a day to upload it. Find some of the best or coolest pictures like we used to. Maybe try uploading the video to a more personal friend and family circle instead of adding to the online reel glut of which there will be hundreds of. Maybe the whole world doesn't need to see the trip there. Maybe post a pic of the pre or post game to a tighter community like in the message board days to talk about it instead of blasting antics to thousands of people who don't even know you or you don't know. I mean I admit if I fly to a different country for something big, it's natural to have several pictures, and I also think there's intent behind it. Sometimes I get the impression people just post stuff to post, and one can tell the difference between a 50-picture album made with thoughtfulness(like a group going to Wacken and posting it to their friends) and a 50-picture album that's just thrown into public social media for the hell of it where thousands upon thousands of people end up tripping over a stranger's antics.
But in any case, maybe enjoy the gig swinging your neck around in the front row instead of watching the entire thing through your phone and give back some of that energy that the band is feeding to you.
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