Simon Jenkins: The post-technology revolution is coming

Published on Wednesday 1 July 2009 20:40

A FUNNY thing happened on my way back from Springsteen at Glastonbury. I was driving across Hyde Park and distinctly heard Springsteen again. And I mean the man, not a recording. Admittedly I could not see him but he was there, live.

This week in London come Blur, Spinal Tap and Kings of Leon. Which is just as well, as you cannot get near Jude Law in Hamlet, Helen Mirren in Phdre, Simon Russell Beale in The Winter's Tale or Sylvie Guillem at Sadlers Wells. And soon we shall have the Proms.

Whenever everyone is agreed that a revolution is taking place, the smart money looks to the next revolution. And that one is staring us in the face.

At Glastonbury this year I saw absolutely no screens and a chorus of jeers greeting any BlackBerry that burst into sound, assuming it could be heard.

Computerised communication will never die, but a truth of any innovation is that only when the fascination of its novelty wears off does its real usefulness become apparent. The internet is a means of communicating a message but it is not a message in itself. The message, as in all forms of communication, is some form of direct human relationship.

The astonishing crowds now paying astonishing sums to hear live performances can no longer be regarded as an archaic hangover from before recorded sound was invented. Tickets to Glastonbury and O2 cost as much as stalls at Covent Garden, and with no public subsidy in sight. They are a phenomenon of human congregation, which the internet aids and publicises but has completely failed to replace.

My parents' generation thought electronic inventions would obliterate anything live: the concert, the opera, the stage play, the political rally, the church service, the book and the newspaper. Futurologists, dazzled by the wonder of each new device, duly told them and they believed it. If it was new, it must be good and must replace old.

How then to explain that a ticket to see Madonna, Bruce Springsteen or Led Zeppelin must nowadays cost more than each artist's entire recorded output? Stars no longer do tours to promote their CDs, they do CDs to promote their tours. The physical presence and the showmanship of the great bands draw the crowds as much as their musicianship. Not download but live is the real internet revolution.

Nor is it just the exhilaration of being present at a concert. The big money is in reality, even the ersatz reality of what is left of television. Simon Cowell's X Factor has transformed showbusiness television. "We're going to change the way we do auditions," he said, "by putting them in front of a live audience."

Such spectacle is not just more fun than rehearsed and recorded. It also has the artless suspense of the amateur, the apprehension of the unexpected, the authentic.

Meanwhile, more people are attending live performances in London surely than ever before. Running my eye down the listings, I see Wilde, Chekhov, Ibsen, Racine and no fewer than five Shakespeares on stage, and most are sold out. Television viewing figures show that the screen as a conduit for entertainment is losing its appeal as evening entertainment. I recently noticed that sure sign of demise, a columnist deploring the fact that children don't watch it any more. The box is still on, but as wall-paper.

People who have spent all day sitting in front of screens want no more of them when they get home. They clearly crave human contact. They go out. The fastest growing middle-class pastime, so I am told, is the literary and arts festival, coupled with lectures and debates. These deeply old-fashioned public events are unchanged in form (and often in venue) from their Victorian precursors. But anything will do to escape the ubiquitous flickering screen.

The internet is ideal for communicating information but it is alarmingly mean at disgorging cash. Like all media, it is only as good as its message, and the message is the yellow brick road to live. Social networking is a means to an end, anything from a good party to a good marriage. Just as downloaded music is a proxy for the real thing, so MySpace and FaceBook are proxies for live friendship. The word virtual, which so exhilarated the early supporters of the web, is just what it says, not complete, not real.

Until recently, live was considered a relic of the past. We should now realise that it is a foretaste of the future. My parents' generation got something wrong. They never predicted that most people's response to a soulless digitised society would not be to succumb. When they have money to spend on leisure, the leisure they want involves participation and human intercourse. They google fun and go out to find it.

Young people are reinventing the city not as a virtual society, synonymous with a social wilderness. They are creating a city of actual, not virtual, reality in which humans communicate with each other as city people have always done, face to face. Chaucer commented on the curious fact that, come each spring, people loved to go on pilgrimages. Today's pilgrims love any excuse to congregate. It is what marks them out as social animals.

So by all means pocket your mobiles, iPhones and BlackBerrys. But although they may lead you to happiness they are no substitute for it. The smart money is live.

&#149 Simon Jenkins is a writer and broadcaster