‘Put it away! Put it away!’: Negotiating smartphone norms in performing arts

This article examines the complex presence of smartphones during performances, focussing on how audiences, performers and managers navigate the tensions between digital connectivity and the need for immersive attention. Drawing on qualitative interviews with theatre professionals in Norway and ethnographic observations in Oslo, London and New York, the study demonstrates how social norms surrounding smartphone use are negotiated in different cultural contexts. The analysis highlights key tensions and dilemmas: audiences balance personal documentation with collective immersion, managers weigh promotional visibility against aesthetic disruption and performers experience interruptions that alter the sensory and affective dynamics of liveness. Extending Fischer-Lichte’s concept of the autopoietic feedback loop, the article proposes the concept of a ‘hybrid feedback loop’, in which audience responses circulate simultaneously through embodied co-presence and digitally mediated attention. This theoretical reframing captures how digital devices reconfigure the ecology of performance, reshaping how liveness is produced, perceived and policed in contemporary cultural institutions.