Last night, I went to the first large concert I’ve attended in a couple of years. I saw Barenaked Ladies play at Allstate Arena out in the ‘burbs. At the end of the set, they dropped the houselights and left us in the dark to scream, cheer, and clap for a few minutes before the encores. Once upon a time, the crowd would pull out their lighters, jack up the butane to maximum flame, and hold their flaming lighter up a show of crowd solidarity.

Allstate Arena, like pretty much every arena I know of these days, bans smoking, meaning that a lot fewer people had their lighters handy to hold up in the dark.

Instead, I looked around and saw that the lighters had been replaced with cell phones. A thousand or more glowing screens and keypads floated in the darkness.

I would have taken a picture of it but, ironically, I’d left my phone at home.