April 14--When the head of AMC Theatres' parent company told Variety earlier this week that he is open to the idea of allowing audiences to use their phones to text at the movies, who among us was surprised?
Movie theater attendance has been relatively stagnant over the past 10 years, according to the stats posted here. And even though the "most dependable and growing demo at the box office is the 50-plus crowd," per Deadline, this has long been a business aimed at the young.
Of course a movie theater chain would think of ways to make the theatrical experience more appealing to millennials. (Although I'm willing to bet a number of millennials hate the idea as much as anyone else.)
"We need to reshape our product in some concrete ways so that millennials go to movie theaters with the same degree of intensity as baby boomers," AMC Entertainment's CEO Adam Aron said in that interview with Variety. "When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don't ruin the movie, they hear, 'Please cut off your left arm above the elbow.'"
Still, he's aware that there are huge swaths of moviegoers who will lose their minds if forced to sit near people who are texting or talking on their phones. "What may be more likely," he said, "is we take specific auditoriums and make them more texting-friendly."
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I don't know how the studios, which are alert to piracy concerns, will feel about that. It will be much harder for ushers and other employees to spot those who may be surreptitiously filming in the theater if everyone is allowed to have their phones out at all times.
I wrote extensively about the debate over texting in darkened shared spaces in 2011, and we have yet to come to any sort of consensus. We can't stand the behavior of those around us, but we are probably guilty of a few faux pas ourselves.
It goes beyond movie theaters. At any point in the day I find myself silently berating a person's tech-influenced rudeness. The friend who can't sit down for a meal without putting their phone on the table and stopping to answer any and all texts. Or the able-bodied knucklehead who is tucked into priority seating on public transportation who is so immersed in their phone that they have to be tapped on the shoulder and asked to move so that someone who does need to sit down can do just that.
Last night when I was at the gym, a woman decided her workout was the ideal time to carry on a phone conversation through her mic-equipped earbuds. She was talking so loudly, I could hear her over the music streaming through my earbuds. I'm partial to deploying a death glare in the offender's direction, but ultimately that's as far as it goes. Who wants to spend their day confronting every person who bugs you? (And I've been guilty of taking a call while on the elliptical, but in my shaky defense, the gym was empty at the time.)
Just the other day the Wall Street Journal ran a story that pointed out, as more and more families ditch the once-ubiquitous landline -- aka, the family phone -- we've actually lost certain social skills and niceties along the way. "Small children had an opportunity to learn telephone manners, siblings had to share and parents had to set boundaries governing its use."
I think about this whenever I get emails from students who are reaching out as part of a class assignment and asking for my thoughts. I want to encourage them and make them feel like they've had a personal experience with a reporter, so I put some thought into my replies. But I have not once received a "thank you" afterward. I have to think it's generational. Or that they were simply never taught that when asking for something, always say "thank you" in return. This is a skill that will actually help them in their careers. Or maybe it won't matter by the time they're in the workforce and everybody just skips the thank-yous?
In that aforementioned piece I wrote a few years ago, I talked with futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted that over the next couple of decades years, technology will eventually collapse all of our screens (phone, laptop, TV, etc.) into a single entity that will actually operate from inside our brains through nanobots, creating a fully immersive, three-dimensional experience.
And yet no matter how advanced the technology gets, he said, we will always have that compulsion to stop and check a message.
Or as technology and culture writer Nicholas Carr told me at the time: "We have trained ourselves to multitask even when we're relaxing."
nmetz@tribpub.com
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