Life on the really, really small screen

Last weekend I saw Snow Patrol at the Manchester MEN arena. It's a good venue, big without being enormous, really nice sound system. Pretty good all round in fact. And Snow Patrol were excellent, great rapport with the audience, could belt it out, did all the crowd-pleasers.

But here's the thing – the number of people who essentially watched the gig on their mobile phones was amazing. As I looked across the venue, it was like a starscape of little rectangular lights.

For them it was an almost entirely mediated experience (albeit with a completely kick-ass sound system).

It got me thinking about just how many of us experience the world around us these days on the devices we carry along the way. I'm a keen photographer. But a while back I realised that if I had my camera with me I'd experience my immediate surroundings with a view to the shots I could get rather than for their own merit. I now leave it behind more than I used to.

Of course you can see why this happens. The desire to share our experiences with others (and to live vicariously through their experiences too) is a deeply human one. The long history of storytelling tells us this as much as the desire to chat over the garden fence.

But today's devices are removing the barrier of distance and time from the equation – and are giving those of us who create the stories in the first place one more thing to consider in how we deliver and disseminate our content.

And for those that weren't there...