In the heyday of rock music, no stadium gig was complete without a slow number that prompted the crowd to hold aloft their cigarette lighters to create hundreds of flickering points of light. Now the same effect is created by hundreds of people holding up their mobile phones as the audience takes photo after photo to prove they were there.

This is most likely to occur in the U.K. as the British use their mobile phone as a camera more than anyone else. They are also among the world’s fastest adopters of social-networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, posting the subsequent photos or at least updating their status to relate how great the gig was, as a way of keeping in touch with an ever-expanding and ephemeral collection of “friends.”

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