Life Beyond the Lens

 Some of Berlin's most renowned clubs have long insisted that the camera lenses on their clientele's phones must be covered up to ensure that everyone is present in the moment and people can let go without fear of their image suddenly appearing somewhere online.

Venues in London, Manchester and New York now enforce the same rules... phones will either be stickered or forbidden. "People need to stop taking pictures and start dancing to the beat," said one of the club's original founders.

The Dance of Spring
Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864-1933)
Photo credit: Glasgow Life Museums. [CC BY-NC-ND]

He is right, but it seems the zeitgeist might be aligning in that direction anyway. If 2025 has had any kind of defining cultural theme, it perhaps boils down to people's increasing sense that a life completely beholden is no life at all. To this, add two connected trends: a drop in millions of people's use of social media, and a rising yearning for experiences that are more authentic...

If your interest in posting what you had for lunch seems to be waning and you now look back at a habit of doing so with mild horror, you are not alone. According to analysis commissioned earlier this year by the Financial Times, time spent on social media peaked back in 2022, and fell by almost 10% by the end of 2024... The decline they highlight is most pronounced among people in their teens and 20s...

Over the summer, the New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka held out the prospect of what he called Posting Zero: " a point at which normal people - the unprofessionalized, uncommodified, unrefined masses - stop sharing things on social media as they tire of the noise, the friction and the exposure".

Or look at internet dating... Ofcom tells us that between 2023 and 2024, Tinder lost 594,000 UK users, while Hinge dropped by 131,000 and Bumble by 368,000... In a letter to its shareholders, Match [the company that owns Tinder and Hinge] acknowledged that younger people were seeking, "a lower pressure, more authentic way to find connections"...

Three weeks ago, I went with my 16-year old daughter... to see Wet Leg who were brilliant. When they play live, their big hit Chaise Longue is an invitation to go nuts. But one woman next to us spent its entire three minutes acrobatically shooting phone footage from every conceivable angle, which entailed repeatedly reaching over those around her, while remaining completely oblivious to how much she was spoiling people's fun.

When people do such things, I sometimes wonder: do they go home and look at what they filmed, and post it somewhere? Or does it just sit on their phones unwatched and pointless? And will they therefore arrive at the conclusion that seems to be hitting more and more people: that it's good to stop, to go offline more often, and rediscover the joys of being in the moment with other human beings? A lot more hangs on that question than we might think.

(John Harris, The Guardian, 2025)

If you're in a night club aren't you there to dance and have the craic with your friends? Do you always need to take pictures there or in art galleries, restaurants, concerts and  sporting events? I don't know about rediscovering " the joys of being in the moment with other human beings", but by not concentrating on what you are there to see, eat or do aren't you missing out? Do we want our lives to be lived primarily though a lens?