Stage Struck

I KNOW THIS may be hard to believe, but there is still some evidence to suggest that not everybody in the universe has an iPhone.

In Ireland, in fact, iPhone owners are a tiny minority: about 250,000 out of more than five and a half million phone subscriptions, or less than 6 per cent. But that’s not the impression you get from the more app-happy sectors of the Twittering classes, among them yours truly, for whom Steve Jobs’s smart phone counts as the greatest invention since the scroll wheel or the Bread Slicing App.

The Absolut Fringe, which starts next week, has launched its own free application, and it’s fairly fantastic. The Fringe app is not quite as bells-and-whistles as the Carlsberg Cat NAV, or as elegant as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe app, which could pinpoint your location in the festival maelstrom, give idiot-proof directions to the nearest show, and help book your tickets entirely for free (apart from a small mortgage in data roaming costs).

But the Dublin festival app – essentially an easier brochure to browse than the print version – does have its own character. “Absolut Fringe celebrates the new and the next, the bold and the daring, the young and the restless,” it says, which makes it sound like a festival of US soap operas. More specifically, it celebrates Apple slaves: the impulsive and the consuming, the overcharged and the oblivious, the distracted and the insufferable (of whom I am a proud member).

What the app does it does well, parsing 100 shows by date, venue or category, aiding bookings and pointing the way to venues. It did advise me, under the "bring your ma" programme strand, to go see Medea,Selina Cartmell's new take on the infanticidal maniac, which seems like asking for trouble. I guess every app has its glitches.

If in peril, I could always use it to tweet for help, if anybody could get the damn Twitter button to work. But the best thing about it is its product warning: “Frequent/ Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes, Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humour, Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity and Frequent/Intense Alcohol, Tobacco, Drug Use or Reference to these.” Now that sounds like a proper Fringe festival.

The real story behind the rise in festival apps is one of incentives and sales. Audiences for all kinds of performances are down. People are leaving their bookings later and later, and box offices resound with the dull clack of bitten fingernails. The giddy interaction that an app brings among “highly loyal super-consumers” is an asset in an age of hair-trigger consumption: a way of turning thumbs on screens into bums on seats.

This isn’t just technological solipsism: marketing researchers Arts Audiences found that theatregoers were 30 per cent more likely to have an iPhone than the general population.

Does this affect the art itself or treat festival audiences as an exclusive, gadget-oriented club? I doubt it. The question is whether it can be shown to actually grow audiences. Come to think of it, there’s probably an app for that.