When I first visited Graceland back in the spring of ’94 it was one of those tourists’ treks that became pilgrimage. A friend and I were camping in the Great Smoky Mountains when a fear of flash flooding cut our trip short. Defeated by the elements, we began to traverse Tennessee, sticking to the back-roads and narrating the journey with truck-stop compilations. By the time we rode into Memphis, I was humming “It’s now or never,” and in the words of the singer Paul Simon, I started to believe that “we all will be received in Graceland.”      

The gaudy mansion more than delivered. My favorite rooms were the Jungle room (Priscilla’s too) and the TV room, which has something like nine old sets mounted to the walls. The joy of the Graceland experience, however, cannot be reduced to bad interior design. The thrill was not in the house itself, but rather the experience of the house — the goofy guide telling canned jokes, waiting cramped in Elvis’ hallway for the previous tour to move on, the camaraderie with the other pilgrims.

When I returned to the mansion in 2002, Graceland had transformed. The millennial visitor did not get to commune with his comrades or ask questions of a guide. All this had been removed and replaced with the audio tour. Included in the price of admission, each tourist was equipped with earphones and a little digital player that narrated details of the house and Elvis’ life.

The new tour was a solitary adventure, each visitor in control of his or her own pace. In the midst of this solo tour, I tried an experiment; I took off my earphones. The result was an eerie silence, like lifting your head and looking around a room during silent prayers. These people didn’t look like pilgrims; they looked like bored middle-schoolers.

In my 1994 pilgrimage to Graceland, the narrative emerged in the experience of the place. By 2002, that narrative, though arguably more accurate and exhaustive, was locked in an audio textbook and teacher wouldn’t let us pass notes.

Mike Hale’s recent New York Times article, “A Concert You Could Read Like a Book,” on the introduction of digital playbills to the New York Philharmonic, makes a similar complaint, albeit in regards to a different medium. “The Concert Companion was entertaining,” he concedes, “but I was there to listen, not to read, and after a while it was just a hand-held distraction from the pure, focused experience that a meaningful concert — or play or movie or exhibit — needs to be.”

I think “pure, focused experience” is a bit of an exaggeration. Don’t we all enjoy browsing a playbill before a performance or during intermission? The new technology is not a distraction from some pristine audience experience. Rather it’s a distraction from other distractions— free association, memory, milling about. What we loose then, through this type of technology-mediated over programming, is unstructured time and space, a cognitive free swim. In the end, the more museums and performance spaces transform themselves, albeit through good intentions, into lap swim, the more diligent we’ll have to become at seeking out unstructured places were we can all join in the performance.  

Benjamin Helphand