No One Watches Your InstaStory Videos
Marc Anthony and a Meditation on the Fourth Wall
Marc Anthony from reallyyyy far away with a reallyyyy good zoom
Last night, I went to see Marc Anthony in concert at Puerto Rico’s biggest venue, El Coliseo. I’d seen the posters advertising his show for months but, for some reason, I put off buying tickets until the last minute, so Norbert and I were seated way up in the nosebleed section. Still, I wasn’t worried. I knew Marc would bring the energy—and he definitely did! I want to be that energetic and smooth when I’m fifty!
Even though we were sitting as far away from Marc Anthony as possible, that didn’t stop any of my neighbors from pulling out their phones and filming away. I find this phenomenon so curious, and it makes me wonder—will they ever look at that grainy, wobbly video again?
I’m guilty of this myself. I often take video during performances, whether they be music concerts or dance shows. But as I sat there watching this happen all around me last night, I thought back to all those hours of footage that I must have on my external hard drive and truly couldn’t remember a time that I had watched any of those videos of performances past. Except for Beyoncé. I’ve definitely gone back and watched videos that I’ve taken during her shows, and I’ve even turned the videos into mp3’s so that I can listen to them whenever I want. Who wouldn’t want to listen to a Beyoncé concert all the time?
But besides Beyoncé, what about the hundreds of other shows where I kept my camera between myself and the stage, watching the show on the tiny screen instead of the live panorama in front of me? In all of those performances, I made the choice to film the event for posterity (which never materialized) instead of purely enjoying the moment. You see this happen all the time at children’s school shows, the audience a sea of iPads recording the moment to enjoy it later. Louis CK has a funny bit about this. "The resolution on the kid is unbelievable, it's totally HD."
But now, with our phones and an internet connection, videos of these performances don’t have to live a sad, lonely life on an external hard drive. The grainy, wobbly video can have a new, exciting life on social media, where others who weren’t in attendance can try to make out what’s happening in the video as you wave the phone around while singing and filming at the same time. That brings me to another question: does anyone watch these videos when you post them to your social media? Or do they simply skip through them, like I tend to do? (Louis CK will say - no one watches your videos.)
A woman sitting in front of me seemed to be livestreaming the entire concert, alternating between filming a tiny Marc Anthony barely visible on the stage and filming herself singing along to every word of every song. In this way, the woman was sharing her experience with her followers; people who weren’t sitting right beside her could watch her videos and feel like they were. Also, she wasn’t only sharing the experience with her followers, but she was making them a part of her experience. Even though they weren’t physically there, they were there with her, in a strange way, through the phone.
It makes me think about the fourth wall in theater, the idea that there’s an imaginary wall between the actors and the audience; the audience can see through it but the actors cannot. Social media has thoroughly broken the fourth wall of our world (if all the world was a stage). I’m not 100% sure about this analogy, but bear with me. Social media has given us that audience, and yet there is no fourth wall between them and ourselves (the main actors of our lives). With social media, we are often (I won’t say constantly, because it varies from person to person) engaging with our audience; although they are no physically present, the way they are in a theater, they are psychically present through our device. But when does the curtain go down?
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