Sucked into your phone

 According to a YouGov poll from last year, more than 60 per cent of 18-24-year-olds prefer watching TV with captions, compared with 13 per cent of their parents...

What accounts for this youthful passion for reading while you watch? Phones, of course. Or to use the antiseptic industry jargon, "second screening": enjoying a film or show while simultaneously being sucked into your phone...

How many gigs have I watched through my phone camera, overpowered by the impulse to prove I was there? How many times have I muttered at morons - sorry, art lovers - snapping photos of Monet's sand-grainy sunbathers and Degas' ballerinas, rather than, oh I don't know, looking at them?...

Vetheuil
Claude Monet (1840-1926)
Photo Credit: Glasgow Life Museums [CC BY-NC-ND]

At a Banksy exhibition at Glasgow's modern art gallery last year, visitors' phones were sealed in foam pouches at the - conveniently anonymous - artist's request.

"We want folk not trying to view the show though a phone, but seeing it for themselves," said Gareth James, the gallery manager, with a kind of touching reasonableness. Many musicians now ask fans to put their phones away:

"We can either play or we can pose," snapped the ever-ornery Bob Dylan during a gig in Austria in 2019.

Behind the grumpiness lies something thoughtful: a belief that art requires not just concentration but a kind of surrender...

(Susie Goldsbrough, The Times, 2024)

A sad state of affairs when photographing a picture through your phone becomes more important than looking very carefully at a piece of art, or recording an event rather than just experiencing its uniqueness. 

 

The Rehearsal
Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
Photo Credit:Glasgow Life Museums [CC BY-NC-ND]