wordwhacker

My parents went to the Elton John concert last night. I would have loved to go but tickets were both expensive as hell and nigh impossible to get. So I was sitting at home listening to his greatest hits on the stereo when I get a call on my cell phone from my MUM's cell phone. At first it was just garbled bits of sound, but then it resolved into Elton John's voice singing "Tiny Dancer." The sound quality was mostly terrible; the piano (which I could only hear for part of the time) sounded like a mangled child's toy some of the time, thanks to the tiny microphone in the phone being TOTALLY blown out with the volume (and the speaker in my own phone isn't exactly audio magic itself.) But I could hear his voice well enough to make out the lyrics and the melody. So I stood by my front door and lip-synched to one of my favourite songs in the world, which was being sung live by Sir Elton himself, right here in Saint John, and bounced from mum's cell phone up to a satellite and down again to mine, about a kilometre and a half away.

I thought that was a pretty cool digital media experience.

My parents were telling me that there were signs up everywhere saying not to bring recording equipment or cameras to the show. But god, what's a cell phone now WITHOUT a camera? And I'm not too "up" on cell technology but if they're becoming mp3 players as well it seems to me that recording technology will be standard issue soon, too. So what are you supposed to do? Take away peoples' cell phones? That would probably be an exercise in complete madness.

( More thoughts below: why cellphones could soon be dangerous, writing papers long-hand, and sports TV as a dramatic narrative. )