March 11, 2004
Mobile phones are the new lighters
John Alderman shares an experience he had in Tokyo last week in his Journal on TheFeature.com.
"I was channel surfing in Tokyo last week and clicked into a concert clip of a pop band playing to a large excited hall of people. All the standard arena-rock theatrics were in play: call and response, hand waving, and huge, overly dramatic gestures. Though the music was—to these jaded ears—nothing special the singer was charismatic enough, and his frenetic enthusiasm for interacting with the crowd made the show special.
What piqued my attention was when the singer opened his clamshell phone and waved its brightly lit screen in the air back and forth over his head. The audience quickly got the message and responded in kind. A camera panning over the audience captured the scene of hundreds of young, Japanese concertgoers happily waving their opened handsets in the air, creating a beautiful field of bobbing lights."
The first time I read about cell phones being raised in concerts was in an article from the Washington Post (no longer online - but I have a copy if anyone would like it) dated April 20, 2001 and entitled "Ring Tones Strike a Chord", written by T.R. Reid.
"When the immensely popular Nylon Beat, Finland's home-grown version of the Spice Girls, plays the opening bars of a song at its rock concerts, fans by the hundreds hold up their phones and ring along with the singers.
Nylon Beat released its last single, "Not Guilty," as a ring tone even before the CD came out; this teaser proved so effective that "Not Guilty" hit No. 1 in Finland on the first day of sale."
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