With their Twelve Stops and Home debut, Sussex’s the Feeling have made arguably the best British rock album of the year, but to get the full experience, you have to see them live. The opening show of their three-night residency at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire last month featured the kind of excitement unique to a band in a state of delirious ascendancy. As their recorded output gained energy, and their singer, Dan Gillespie Sells, showed the kind of rock charisma rare for a man with the speaking voice of Frank Spencer, you felt you were witnessing an exceptional bit of right-place, right-time, right-people chemistry. Unfortunately, the lady with the red hair sitting on the front row of the first tier failed to see any of it.

Of course, if you’d questioned her, I’m sure she would have said that, on the contrary, she had managed not to miss a single moment with her Motorola V3i megapixel video-camera phone. But as a first-hand witness, she was an absentee. Even the man three seats to her right, with his zoom- function obsession, and the girls immediately to the right of him, who’d been backstage and filmed themselves meeting the support act, then gigglingly replayed it during the first two songs, looked up from their viewfinders towards the stage a few times.

It’s harsh to single out an individual for documenting a gig with a mobile when 20% of the crowd are doing the same thing, but what was amazing about the red-haired lady was her dedication to her task. To her, there was obviously nothing unusual about soaking up the experience this way. Even when she danced, her gaze never faltered. Pretty soon, you stopped worrying about your view being blocked and started simply worrying about her. Had she forgotten the thrill of direct connection with a band in a live setting? More to the point, have we? Five years ago, you might have seen a couple of camera phones at a gig, at most. Now it would be genuinely odd if there weren’t at least a dozen in your eye line at any given moment. It’s frequently been said that the camera phone has taken the place once occupied by the cigarette lighter at concerts. The difference is that people only really used to wave cigarette lighters during the ballads, and they didn’t upload their lighter fluid to their hard drives to commemorate the experience.

Naturally, the vicarious happy-snapping plague is one that has spread far beyond the music world. A relative of mine recently returned from a trip to Yosemite National Park with a photograph of every one of the 23 other members of his touring party standing at the park’s famous summit, simultaneously photographing it with their phones. Yet somehow the idea of reducing a sharp first-hand experience to a blunted second-hand one seems even sadder in the field of pop and rock. The whole point of gigs is that they make a lot of sense in the moment, and rarely much afterwards. I would never want to rewatch Aerosmith’s Wembley Stadium concert from 1999, as it would not be the transcendental experience I remember, and would devalue my (probably deluded) mental picture of it. The mythology of concerts, too, is rooted in their fleeting nature. When your mate Colin tells you he was at Spike Island to see the Stone Roses in 1990, you figure he’s probably lying, but since there’s no proof otherwise, isn’t that sort of nice? According to Brian Raftery, the founder of Idolator.com, the New York music-gossip blog renowned for its “Hey, Asshole!” slot) — which asks the public to report (and, somewhat contradictorily, photograph) obnoxious gig-going behaviour — the rise of the camera phone is symptomatic of a wider decline in live-music culture. “Gig etiquette isn’t dying — it’s dead,” Raftery says. “Concerts used to be about singing along, flailing about in front of the stage or just listening intently. Now they’re about trying to sidestep a bunch of gabbering text addicts who spend the whole time documenting the event with their camera phones rather than experiencing it. I worry we’re raising a generation of concert-goers more interested in bragging about seeing a band than actually connecting with the music.”

It’s hard to think of a climate more depressing, as a consumer of live music, than one where a shaky film or series of snapshots must be used as a document of proof. And, surely, proof is all that the millions of films and pictures of live bands that are being taken every week will be used for. After all, it’s not as if anyone’s going to spend much time watching the things, is it? When the red-haired Feeling fan gets home, will she really want to sit down and see a tiny two- dimensional Gillespie Sells launching into an aurally inferior version of I Love It When You Call? It seems unlikely — particularly as, while filming it, she’s essentially watched it once already. It’s a special moment captured, certainly, but how special is it in the end, when there are so many other, identical special ones out there? Surely the effect of watching one of these DIY movies is less “Ooh, I remember getting drunk and singing along” and more “Ooh, I remember watching that through that tiny bit of technology”? And will anyone else care? It seems telling that the unsanctioned Feeling items available on eBay can be counted, at the time of writing, on the fingers of no hands. There are no “unofficial films” — not even a copy of the CD of the show that was being sold in the foyer five minutes after the encore ended (presumably just in case people didn’t feel they’d fully cheapened the experience by using their phones). It almost makes you feel sorry for old-fashioned, out-of-demand bootleggers. Snaggle-toothed and untrustworthy as they may frequently have been, at least they were subtle.

Tom Cox’s The Lost Tribes of Pop is published by Portrait, £9.99