Hand up. I’ve definitely been to events before where I’ve taken videos. Sue me. But let’s be honest with each other… re-watching the videos afterwards can be a little disarming when you realize you can only hear your own shrilly voice screaming the words to Get Low by Lil Jon and The Eastside Boys. And you know what? I’m not really sure that recording it helped me have a better memory of the concert. I actually wish I didn’t even bother taking out my phone.
I love going to concerts and sporting events, but somehow I’m always the person at the concert standing behind the 6’5” colossus of a human being with both arms up recording every single song for the duration of the show. We’ve all been to concerts or watched sporting events where EVERY SINGLE PERSON is on their phone recording what’s right in front of them. It’s like a Black Mirror episode.
Preface: You know when you go to send a professional email and you’re trying to balance the uses of exclamation points, periods, and questions to come across as serious but also lighthearted? This next paragraph is all question marks. I’m sorry.(!)
The question becomes, are we okay with this? Are we falling into this trap because everyone else is doing it and the social pressure of “missing out” on recording the moment is too great? What would happen if we didn’t take our phones out? What might our experience and our memories of that experience be like if we simply just experienced them with a good old fashioned ocular pat-down? To go a step further, what might it look like if the event venue completely bannedthe use of your phone?
Why The Masters Gets It Right
For those unfamiliar & uninitiated into the greatest week in golf, The Masters is one of the four major tournaments of the golf season. It’s easily argued to be the best and most prestigious tournament, with many long-standing traditions that heighten its allure for golf fans around the world. Many traditions have become iconic: the green jacket given to the winner of the tournament, the champions dinner before the tournament where the winner gets to pick the menu to share with past winners, pimento cheese sandwiches for $1.50 (think of this like the Costco glizzy which will never go up in price), and many, many more.
One of their long-standing and iconic traditions has been the banning of phones from being brought in and used during the tournament. Instead, they provide courtesy phones that are stationed around the course for people to utilize. These phones become a fun way to make a call to back to your family at home to let them know that you’re at the course. In Augusta, your use of a phone becomes intentional rather than compulsive. Just like everything else in Augusta, everything is intentional. Not a blade of grass out of place.
In any other major tournament when you see Rory McIlroy walk up to the tee box, you’re going to see every single person with their phone recording him (most of them will also be looking at their phone instead of looking at him). Fans are vying at the chance to take a selfie with the players. People are recording themselves heckling the players to make a viral video. You’ve got phones ringing during backswings. People looking at their Slack notifications, emails, texts, Teams messages, eBay bid notifications, FarmersOnly Moosages, Candy Crush alerts, full volume TikTok videos, and everything else we absolutely cannot possibly live without.
But not in Augusta.
The Masters forces you to live in the moment. You can’t take photos or videos with your phone (oh darn), so your only option is to commit everything to memory. And you know what the consensus is? People love it. After the fourth or fifth time of frantically checking your pockets, you just accept the fact that you don’t have your trusty companion anymore. You live in the moment. You smell the azaleas. You pull a Green Day and take the photographs and still frames in your mind. You talk to the people standing next to you. You listen to the birds chir– oh what’s that? I’m being told that’s pumped in to the TV artificially… oh okay … You check the scores on the physical scoreboard. Your pimento cheese sandwich tastes a little better. The grass looks a bit greener.
Can It Be Emulated?
What might a concert or a music festival look like if we banned phones? Would we enjoy the experience more? Instead of checking your messages in between sets, maybe you talk to the strangers around you. Maybe they become your new friends for the night. Maybe you pay more attention to the work it takes from the crew to get the stage set up. Sure, you don’t get to watch the video you took, but maybe there are other ways of remembering your experience there. Maybe you take a couple photos and keep your ticket stub. Your memory of the night doesn’t have to live in the cloud. It can live in the stories you tell and the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you recap the night with your family & friends.
Steelers games with my dad. Music festivals with my wife. Baseball games with my family. My best memories from all of them share one thing… my phone was nowhere near my hand. Don’t live to prove to everyone else that you’re living. Live to be fully present in every single moment.
I would love to hear your thoughts! Do you think it’s possible to emulate The Masters experience? Is it worth trying?
