This past summer, I lived with a journaler. My suitemate, Catherine Philips ’26, was a regular Joan Didion, writing away in a windowless room on the fourth floor of Main. More often than not, accompanying her swoopy romantic handwriting would be a physical keepsake, usually a receipt, a ticket or a photograph. I was in awe. I have considered myself a writer since I learned the alphabet, but I could never keep a journal for the life of me, much less remember to include personal memorabilia in the process. Every time Catherine would press the “print receipt” button at checkout, I cringed thinking about my Bank of America notification being my only reminder of a day well-spent. She was turning her daily life into art. My traces of living were being recorded in an alienating binary code. Why was I so uncomfortable with the fact that most of my life was being chronicled on my phone? Talking to other friends about the subject revealed that it had been years since any of them had held a movie ticket in their hand or stuffed a receipt into their pockets. And that made me a little sad. I started to wonder how much of my life is slipping through the cracks of the digital landscape. As the world around us becomes erratic and abstracted through the technology intrinsic to our daily lives, it became clear to me that Catherine’s journal is more important than I realized.
Because I consider a live musical performance the definition of entertainment, I could not help but focus most of my attention on the loss of a concert ticket as a keepsake and the broader implications of its digitization. I jump at any opportunity to watch musical artists live—both those I revere and those I have never heard of, and I know I am not the only one. Concerts have long been associated as a hallmark of youth culture one looks lovingly back on. You will never forget seeing that one band live—for me, it was The Marías. That is why people used to collect their concert tickets and store them in shoeboxes or a desk drawer. As you racked up the colorful slips of paper, you also made memories. But now, concert tickets are on a bright white screen detailed with the blue Ticketmaster logo. A barcode that is scanned and then gone. It disappears into the void. For the average concertgoer, you lost a piece of art reflective of the performer’s current creative direction and a keepsake. But with every event, the digital ticket contributes to the downfall of a form of commercial art, akin to album cover artwork. All of this is being sacrificed for efficiency and data collection; you scan that barcode, and you leave a digital trace that can be used.
Digital tickets dissolve individuals into vats of data. The companies that own the app where you purchase your tickets have access to your preferences and can then cross-list this with other data that has been collected from your digital profile to curate ads and offers for you. At no point is your digital ticket just a ticket. It is an invaluable insight into your life that can be capitalized on. So it is in any ticket seller’s interest to do away with the physical concert ticket in exchange for a chance to profit off of you as long as you choose to attend concerts. Not only does this transition to digital tickets represent a loss of art and design that can be used to reminisce about the important moments of your life or the music industry, but it is also a gift horse. You give up some bits and pieces of your privacy and an irreplaceable keepsake just to streamline a corporation’s path to profit.
It would be untruthful to claim that my worry about the loss of the physical keepsake is solely due to these surveillance and economic issues. It comes from a place of sentiment. There are, of course, several different ways to remember concerts and other meaningful events. But the concert ticket is a unique cross-section of art and an experience that no longer exists. You could take photos and videos. But even if you print out the images, aside from the issues of quality, that photograph is not really given to you by the artist in question. It is another form of art, brought into existence by your attempt to capture a memorable instance in your life. You could buy merch, but a ticket is merch that is included in the price you pay to attend in the first place, so not only do we pay drastically more for concert experiences today, but we also are getting less out of them. A concert ticket is a physical and concrete way to define all the joy I am experiencing as the years fly by and the ground keeps shifting under my feet. But this emotional connection seems to be intuitive, pushing me to ask why something that means a lot to me and lots of other people can be so easily structurally eliminated.
Catherine takes time out of her day to write down her thoughts and tape up a concert ticket next to it; my inability to do the same bothers me. Clearly, physical keepsakes matter to us, yet they are disappearing. I am completely aware that with all the late-stage capitalism-relevant tech issues in our world, this may not be the digital hill to die on. But what does the loss of the physical keepsake mean in the context of this atmosphere? For me, it rings alarm bells as an erasure that is emblematic of larger losses to come.