Mobile Entertainment

I was dragged there by my eight year old son, who regards the antics of CM Punk, Triple H and the rest as genuine sporting drama and the height of urbane sophistication.

What a charming evening it was. Needless to say the WWE money-making machine was as well oiled as the men in trunks. The event programme was £15. Yes, 15 quid! You could get a copy of War And Peace, Les Miserables, Bleak House and Remembrance Of Things Past for that, and still have change. I’m sure most WWE fans have read them already, mind.

No doubt with IP protection in mind, there were signs everywhere telling punters that video cameras would not be permitted inside. It was even printed on the tickets. How 2004 is that? The security guards duly searched my bag for a gigantic Sony Handycam, but it never occurred to them that I might have a camcorder in my pocket with five megapixels and 8GB of RAM and the words Nokia N95 written on the outside. Sure enough, once the action started, it was hard to spot anyone in the crowd who wasn’t filming their favourite moments.

This blanket recording reminded me of an observation made by Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr, at a Nokia Nseries launch event in 2005. He observed that we are now entering the third age of photography. The first was the domain of professionals only, the second was the 35mm age when people recorded special events like weddings and holidays, and the third is the era of continuous recording we’re in now. Basically, mobile phones make it possible to capture every moment of our daily lives, no matter how insignificant.

This is driving the whole UGC/social networking phenomenon, as well as filling cyberspace with a vast landfill of self-indulgent nonsense. Ubiquitous photography has already transformed celebrity magazine publishing and news reporting. Its future implications, when 10 megapixels and multi-gigabyte storage become the norm, can only be guessed at.