Adele Stops Her Show To Chide A Fan For Filming

Adele reminds a fan she is there in “real life”

Adele stopped her concert in Verona, Italy over the weekend to briefly remind a woman in the crowd that she was actually there, live, and could watch the show in real life instead of through her video recorder. Because this is where we are now. We’re so used to staring at our phones, we actually use them as filters through which we see everything in the real world. And it’s getting ridiculous.

“I’m really here in real life. You can enjoy it in real life rather than through your video camera,” Adele says. “This isn’t a DVD… There’s lots of people outside who couldn’t come in.” Ironically, we get to see her message because someone taped it on their camera.

She has a point. How sick are you of going to concerts and having all of the people around you hold their cameras up and tape the whole thing? Or going to your kid’s talent show at school and having a line of parents in front of you who insist that everything their kid does, ever, needs to be documented? Who is going to watch this terrible footage again? Why do people do this? You’re there. Watch the live event. Enjoy it. Put your damn phone down.

Many of us have no video evidence of our childhoods, and somehow we’re still well-adjusted adults. Of course it would be nice to see our smaller selves — but it’s just not possible for those of us whose families didn’t have video cameras.

Many of us may not even have that many photos either. A few family albums you flipped through occasionally used to be the norm. Every year of our lives wasn’t documented meticulously. I personally enjoy the hundreds of photos my family does have, but don’t feel like I’m particularly missing anything because every event I ever participated in as a child wasn’t documented. The pendulum has swung in the other direction. We are over-documenting everything. It’s not even possible for us to look at all of the pictures we now hoard on our computers. There are too many of them.

It’s nobody’s fault, reaching for the phone is just something that has become instinctual. But the memories are probably more precious than the crappy video we’re shooting.

Like Adele says, “you can enjoy it in real life.” It’s a good thing to remember.