For everyone to stay connected at festivals, promoters jack up prices to pay for the overused Wi-Fi.

“Is there anything more frustrating than being at the concert of your life and unable to send a selfie announcing your presence?“

That question opens one of Wall Street Journal’s recent segments profiling the need for more cellular service at large events. Welp, of course there are things more frustrating than not having cell service: Cancer, is one. Losing socks in the dryer, is another. The list goes on …

But the quandary isn’t just another hyperbolic statement to irk readers; it’s a real problem facing the current entertainment industry stuck in an overflow of social media users at popular events. When large groups gather in the same area for things like professional sports or rager-friendly festivals, cell service sucks. Fixing it isn’t as easy as just tossing up more Wi-Fi spots to accommodate the masses, either.

It has to become beneficial for the business involved, or else it’s simply just a waste of money.

That may seem harsh, but it’s a business reality. Why would anyone spend hundreds of dollars accommodating dinner guests with the finest liquors and most expensive cheese? Hospitality, mostly, but since when have businesses ever been hospitable? They’re not, and until they can monetize the services, they just simply don’t care.

Now though, companies are realizing the free marketing potential of such online engagements and are scrambling to find a way to fix the lull in connectivity. Massive entities the likes of Electric Daisy Carnival, Lollapalooza, South By Southwest and others would rather avoid the social media zit of revelers complaining about the lack of service bars. Those frustrations are a PR dent, but are now experiencing odd ways of remediation.

In 2012 at the SXSW festival in Austin, TX, the music, movie and tech convention made sketchy headlines about a controversial tactic used to up the bandwidth at its sprawling site. Dubbed “Homeless Hotspots,” it was a polarizing campaign that took 13 homeless men and outfitted them with backpacks providing access to a 4g network. Some called it "dehumanizing," others, felt it was genius and innovative.

Regardless, the growing concern for connectivity is just a simple matter of the changing of group standards. What was once a relaxing getaway from reality to lose oneself in the music and the moment, has become a must-do experience for a changing generation, which seeks more to let an online network know what they’re doing at that exact moment than to actually care what’s going on around them.

“It sounds whiny, but I want people to know that I’m there right then,” Mia Eriksson, a 21-year-old senior at the University of South Carolina tells Wall Street Journal. “If I post a video at 9 a.m. the next day, no one really cares about it.”

Let’s be honest, do they really care at all, though, no matter the timeframe?

John Jurgensen, a WSJ contributor, says companies like Cisco Systems Inc., SignalShare and others are working diligently to figure out new and cost-effective ways to keep attendees connected. “Solving the problem is a priority for venue owners and event organizers,” he says, but the companies “have been forced to acknowledge fans’ assumption that access to a robust and reliable network is baked into the price of admission.”

“Spotty service in a rural area is one thing,” continues Jurgensen, “but when you pay $300 for that seat in the third row, it’s frustrating to see your phone reduced to a plodding status bar or a spinning progress wheel.”

Maybe, just maybe, revelers are attending the event with flawed existential reasoning if nothing at that point matters more than an electronic device in hand. Paying $300 to stare at a phone all night is hardly worth the trouble of getting off the couch.

Has it all really come to this?

Instead of everyone trying to best others in “look what I did” contests or “I’m here and you’re not betches” gloat-parties, use social entertainment events for what they’re intended, that is, physically socialize and be entertained.

As prices go up, opportunities to experience them go down, and for the price of admission to reach astronomical levels because attentions are focused elsewhere is not only seemingly ironic, but also confusing and downright worthless if an experience is etched into a portable device, and not in our memory banks where they belong.