Soon we will all have seen Shakira

Blessed are the eyes that will see Shakira in the flesh today at the first of the 12 dates of her residency in Madrid. Because, from then on, what remains for the rest of us mortals is to attend, even against our will, the usual reverberation of concert videos on social media. This is not about how annoying it is to have a person in front of you with their phone raised or whether it makes sense to pay for a ticket to spend hours watching everything behind the screen. This is about how saturating the internet with these images plays with our minds and atrophies our capacity for wonder.

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It happened with Bad Bunny’s last world tour — I feel like I was inside the Casita and didn’t even manage to buy a ticket — and it is happening with Karol G’s Tropitour, which started more than a month ago in Chicago but won’t land in Spain until before June 2027. These are shows designed for virality, full of moments to be captured on camera. Having your city among the last stops of a tour becomes a disadvantage. A year is more than enough to learn a concert from start to finish. There is plenty of time to consume at least one spoiler, no matter how much you clean the algorithm.

The Puerto Rican singer performed exclusive songs that were not repeated on any other date. And Rosalía, who closed her Lux Tour in Miami this Wednesday, seated more than 50 guests in a confessional. These are strategies clearly aimed at raising anticipation so that tickets sell out. But they also try to convey a certain sense of uniqueness to something that, date after date, wears out. Are a few minutes of fresh content enough so that the feeling of having seen it all does not persist in the entry line?

As if it weren’t already a lot of work to take care before the big night, it seems you also have to do it afterward. A fan of the South Korean k-pop band Stray Kids claims on X that, after attending their most anticipated concert in Bogotá, she feels like she witnessed it through a live. Although it may seem hard to believe, many people, not content with watching fragments of the concert, watch entire live streams recorded by other attendees on platforms like TikTok. I understand it’s hard to wait, but you have to be cautious. You wouldn’t want the images that stay in your memory to be a blend of the experience of thousands of other Instagram users, rather than a personal memory to treasure.

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And sometimes dozens of dates are not enough for social media to attack memory. Manuel Jabois wrote last month about “the forgotten wonder of being alive” after witnessing the total eclipse, an event not seen in Spain for 114 years. But I can’t help wondering if the lucky ones who observe the solar corona in the south of the peninsula in August 2027 won’t feel a hint of déjà vu after, for a few days, the internet was plastered with photos of the star.

No one likes to forget. We are aware that memory is fragile and it scares us to find ourselves months after an event we were very excited about with a blank mind. In our eagerness to avoid forgetting, we succumb to the temptation to take a photo, record a song or two, to watch the videos later, or we try to refresh what we experienced in someone else’s posts. We ignore that it is a trap. A snake biting its own tail.