The one good thing that’s come of my paying any attention to Sean Parker’s post-wedding social media tempest is that, via New York Magazine, I found out about unplugged weddings. (Since I’m currently at an age when my friends aren’t getting married, and my kids’ friends aren’t old enough, I don’t go to many of them these days.) San Francisco-based photographer Shang Chen explains the case for unplugged weddings:

When the involvement of cell phones, smartphones, iPads got to be too much, I had to put my foot down. There’s a reason why about half my couples this year chose to have an unplugged wedding ceremony. It’s to bring the wedding back to what it is really about: The emotions and beauty of the marriage itself. And in that, electronics have no place.

Shang recommends doing a few things to make this palatable to guests: making it “clear to the guests that you want them to be present;” giving them “other ways to get photos with you,” such as a photobooth at the reception (never seen that), or keeping their hands busy with “something fun for the exit.” This keeps it from being about banning picture-taking, or enforcing a professional monopoly, but positions a ban on picture-taking during the ceremony as as effort to remove a distraction from the event– just like not answering your phone during the vows.

That’s the main idea behind unplugged weddings: that unless you’re a professional, picture-taking is at odds with your ability as a guest to savor the event, and is an imposition on others. As another photographer argues,

By bringing a camera and using it, you are not only excluding yourself from THE moment in the hopes that you’ll take one good picture, but you create an emotional void where you (as a friend or relative) should have been as part of the wedding. You are absent from the very mission that was trusted on you: to be part of the collective celebration of the love of two people.

My experience at a Maroon 5 concert was that it was less of a distraction than I expected, but there the band was playing behind a giant set of screens themselves; unless the wedding music is playing at 90 dB and the altar is showing videos of the couple rappelling out of matching helicopters, I can see how taking pictures is going to be a bit of an issue. And even though I’ve found that photography has made me look at the world more closely, I can see how during a wedding my taking pictures could impinge on others’ experience.

However, not all wedding photographers agree. Mitchell Dyer, for example, argues that

Technology is everywhere. It makes things easier, we can’t live without it and we all love to take photos and share them….

The guests are there to have fun and to celebrate the couple. They are there to live in the moment. In this day in age, living in the moment includes capturing every second with images and video clips with smart phones and ipads. I have zero problem with this. In fact, I encourage it. Embrace it. It’s not changing.

Maybe the most interesting counterarguments against unplugged weddings, though, comes from Andrea Grimes. First,

I don’t think Facebook and Twitter transport most people out of the real world and into some sterile digital sphere, devoid of meaningful human interaction. I think most people use Facebook and Twitter and Vine the way they use their mouths and their arms and their facial expressions: to comment on and create their experiences of the world around them…. We don’t tweet and text message and Vine and Instagram in spite of our memories, but rather we use those technologies to bookmark them and bring them into focus.

In effect, she assumes, picture-taking isn’t a kind of distraction; it’s a form of focus.

Second, it’s a form of collective memory, which is especially valuable at a wedding, which for the bride and groom often feels like an out-of-body event. “[F]lipping through my friends’ Twitter and Facebook feeds” the next day, she said, let her “see how they experienced the evening… while I was off playing bride, daughter, niece, friend, hostess, and general social butterfly.”

Of course, I take issue with Dyer’s idea that we can’t change; here, I think the issue is how much we can change others, or whether in the context of a wedding asking other people to put away the cellphones during the ceremony is either 1) an invasion of their personal space, or 2) a sign that you’re a control freak (or as Andrea Grimes puts it, you think your wedding is “such a magical and important event that regular people can’t take it all in without the careful direction of the couple”).

Personally, I think there’s nothing at all wrong with telling guests to refrain from picture-taking during the ceremony, any more than it’s wrong to expect them to stand when the wedding party walks down the aisle, or to not talk during the vows. If their concern is to have pictures of the ceremony itself, designate one non-professional to take the pictures that go up on Facebook in near real-time. People will have lots of opportunities to take pictures later.