Hello readers!

I can not believe that this journey is even relatively close to coming to an end. Despite our classes concluding in February, school never felt like it was truly over, probably because I had to post on this blog every week. This project has been my lifeline, tying me back to the school that has been the center of my world for the past seven years. And with the conclusion of this project, that lifeline will be severed once and for all.

Regardless, the show must go on and I must complete this project. In five days I will be submitting my final paper. My findings isolated the most important aspects of a concert environment, related to the mob mentality and aggression, are the amount of space dedicated to each person and the disconnect in understanding of the roles each person must fulfill between the attendee and the security officers. In this blog post I'll be talking about the latter of these two options.

I first noticed this phenomenon at the first concert I attended for my research. At this concert (The Neighborhood), which was primarily populated by twelve to fourteen year old girls, many individuals in the crowd were pressed together at the front section of the crowd from early on. Based on my observations of their behavior, it was clear that most of these kids had not attended many general admission concerts before. And though I had probably been exposed to these behaviors before, I had never gone to a concert looking for them, and as a result overlooked them. The attendees were shouting for the attention of security endlessly and when the guards would finally make their way over to see why these individuals were calling for them, the individual would stop shouting and simply complain to the security officer about discomfort. The complaining individual did not even have any suggestions or requests to make. He or she simply wanted someone to listen to his complaints. It was very strange.

This behavior is especially problematic because in distracting security officers with problems that they are not required or expected to resolve, they are less able to attend to focus their efforts on actual problems that require their attention. In addition to that, this behavior creates a "boy who cried wolf" effect that will prove detrimental when the security officers show a delayed response time to an actual issue that requires their attention.

If theres one thing I learned about myself from this research, its that sometimes people outgrow certain artists. For example, Fall Out Boy played a show in Phoenix last night. Since fourth grade, I have been a fan of fall out boy. I remember choreographing dances with my friends to Dance Dance (also in 4th grade), I remember crying my little pop punk heart out when I found out they were going on hiatus in 2009 and I remember jumping out of my chair in my ninth grade biology class when I found out they were getting back together. But, after a weak revival album I was pretty turned off to the band and my taste for them began to fade. I have been to every fall out boy concert in Arizona since 2012, but I did not attend last night. Sometimes you're just too old. I did not like being the only 18 year old at The Neighborhood concert. I can only wait and see if I'll be in that position again.

Keep on keeping on readers!

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