AAAAARGHHHH! Cell phone jammers won't fix the problem, people!!!!!!!!
Half the time when a phone makes noise in a theatre, it's an alarm!!! A jammer WILL NOT, CANNOT stop an alarm from going off!!!
I hear this all the time, "Just make signal jammers legal." But when an idiot patron sets the alarm on their phone to go off during a show (as they often do) and then don't turn the phone off (as they often do) no jamming device in the world will stop that alarm from going off at exactly the moment it's been set to go off.
The alarm is what disrupted "Salesman" so much that Gothamist, a non-theatre blog, wrote a long frustrated post. A jammer would not have stopped that.
The alarm is what disrupted the NY Philharmonic Mahler concert that got all the press. A jammer would not have stopped that.
There is no solution. Phones will continue to go off in the theatre unless people can learn to be considerate. Thus, phones will continue to go off in the theatre. There is nothing that can be done technologically to stop it. When someone brings an alarm clock into a theatre and sets it to go off, no technology will stop that alarm clock from going off. I'd think people wouldn't do it in the first place, but I've obviously been proven wrong on multiple occasions.
I just want to scream anytime someone says "Install a jammer", because it will not solve the problem in addition to being an unrealistic regulatory nightmare (you try and get several multi-billion dollar companies to willingly agree to let other businesses block customer access to their service.)
Updated On: 6/6/12 at 07:12 AM