Mailbag #110: Magical Phones and Googling
/I’ve recently been playing around with an app called RDigit which allows you to move digits from a spectators iPhone calculator on to yours and then do increasingly impossible things with those digits, including moving them around the calculator display. I recently performed it to a small group and at the end, one of the spectators announced “well, that’s clearly a magic app and not a calculator – I wouldn’t trust anything on your phone!”. For someone who regularly uses DFB, Inertia and similar apps, it got me thinking whether I should avoid doing ANY kind of magic where the phone is clearly doing something ‘magical’, like RDigit, so that it isn’t viewed suspiciously every time I get it out, or am I worrying over nothing?—JBP
Sadly, I think you know the answer to this.
Generally, you’re going to want to avoid apps where something amazing happens on your phone. In my opinion, the phone should only be used in magic tricks to do things that phones do: browse the internet, add numbers, look at pictures. This is how to put the least amount of suspicion on the phone itself. For the amateur, you don’t want to poison the idea that your phone is as normal as possible for the sake of future interactions.
Think of it like this. If I use a clipboard in a magic trick, it probably wouldn’t draw suspicion, even if it’s secretly sending everything written on it to a device in my pocket over Wi-Fi. But imagine I did a trick where the clipboard changed color and turned clear. I couldn’t then use it later for “innocent purposes.” It would be totally suspect.
The bummer is that RDigit is a really fun trick that’s whimsical in a way a lot of tricks aren’t, but you do sacrifice something when you perform it. For that reason, I would save it for when you’re showing someone a trick who you are unlikely to see again (i.e., someone who is unlikely to see you perform a trick using your phone again).
In the thread for Craig Petty’s newest trick mind blox on the magic cafe he makes the following statement:
If your audience are googling how your tricks are done you’ve done something wrong. I’m sorry but that’s just a fact. And that goes double for kids. If a kid or a teenager is googling how you did your trick there is a problem.
Thoughts about that? -JOC
I would be shocked if Craig actually believed that. It’s such an antiquated, head-in-the-sand, form of wishful thinking by the old guard of magicians. And I think Craig is a little more tuned into the audiences he performs for than to believe that.
If I had to defend Craig’s point, I would say that in the environments he performs, where he is the hired talent to entertain the guests, then people aren’t going to be overly invested in the magic. It’s meant to entertain them for a set period of time, and then you move on. It’s like a wedding band. Your cousin might have a band at her wedding reception. And you might think, “These guys are great!” But you still don’t leave thinking, “I’ve found a new favorite band!” There’s usually not that kind of connection and synergy between performer and audience in those situations. So yeah, most people are probably going to watch a trick, enjoy it, and get on with their lives.
If you’re performing strolling magic, and someone is googling your tricks when you’re done, you wouldn’t really know. You’d only know if they tracked you down later and said, “I know how you did that!” But people aren’t going to do that unless you come across as an asshole who needs to be taken down a peg or two. So I would say, in professional environments, if you find out that people googling your tricks, then I can agree with Craig that it might be a problem.
But that’s not how it works in amateur/social situations.
What does it mean if someone googles a trick after you perform it?
It means:
The trick stuck with them.
They were fooled.
It was so impactful that they just can’t put the moment behind them.
While we wouldn’t want people searching our tricks after performing them, we actually would want all of those things to be true. Googling is, unfortunately, a common byproduct of what we’re shooting for with out magic.
If you say, “No one ever Googles my tricks. No one is ever suspicious of my props. No one ever questions or wants to examine my gimmicked deck,” I have bad news for you: people are not interested in what you’re showing them.
What’s the alternative? They’re convinced you’re a REAL magician? Or that everyone you perform for just happens to be so utterly charmed by you and your magic that they don’t want to know how you did what you did? Does that seem like a reasonable supposition to you? Such a magician may exist. But you’re not him. And I’m not him. And Craig Petty isn’t him.
It’s a wonderful goal to have. And I’ve certainly had situations where people are so wrapped up in the wonder of the moment that they don’t want to risk bursting the bubble by even thinking about “how” it was done. But those reactions require a lot of work. It’s not the reaction you’ll regularly get from an off-the-shelf trick performed for a stranger.
I promise you, as much as you don’t want someone trying to track down how a trick was done, it’s really not a bad sign.
Just use your head… Don’t ignore the fact that almost every magician’s origin story is that someone showed them a trick, and they were so amazed by it that they just had to learn how it was done.
Of course. This is a classic reaction to being completely amazed. That hasn’t changed. And it won’t change.
And I have to disagree with Craig on the other part of his statement as well. A 12-year-old, who has only known a life with Google and who has used it to search for answers about every unknown thing he has ever encountered, is even more likely to use Google to search out an explanation for a trick than an older person. We can’t suggest otherwise when we ourselves were using everything at our disposal to figure out how a trick was done when we were that age. Why wouldn’t they?
The best course of action is to just assume people are going to google your effects, and then do what you can to make sure they find no satisfying answers. I wrote a post many years ago about the best ways I knew of to make your magic un-googleable.
And remember this… it’s something I’ve said before, but it bears repeating. Magic tricks only work and are only powerful if our audiences approach them with a critical eye. Googling a trick is an extension of the same thought process we want them to approach the trick with. To expect them to throw that critical eye away at the conclusion of the trick is silly.
But please also keep this in mind… The idea of people googling your tricks might depress you. It might feel like people are trying to strip away the magic of the experience, so why bother? But I honestly don’t believe that’s what’s happening. I don’t think people want to find the trick explained on YouTube. I don’t think people want to find that it’s just something you can buy online. I think people want—on some level at least—to search and find no answer at all. I believe people want to feel like they just experienced something special and utterly unique. But the only way they know to really get that feeling is to search the elements of the trick you performed and get:
