Yea, I could probably list a few hundred examples and you could probably shoot each and every one of them down on an individual level. Great. The larger point is that in the aggregate, there are enough individual situations that would be disrupted by jammers in the theatre that it would outweigh the nexus between the number of times someone is going to be inconvenienced by a conversation during a movie and the number of times someone is actually rude enough to pick up the phone during a movie. At the end of the day, it's a cost-benefit analysis.
If a movie theatre did in fact install jammers each parent concerned about their kid (yea, it's probably not a true emergency, but subjective perception matters) or each doctor (I'm thinking more about delivering babies, which can mean being on call for weeks at a time, than an ER doctor) might choose to skip the movie. The end result is that that the theatre will likely take a hit on their profits. That's not a compelling reason to invest in installing a jammer.
The whole "we survived just fine without constant connectivity" argument is flawed. Yea, we did a lot of things without modern technology. We got along fine without movies, driving to the movies, mobile phones, the Internet, or arguing on the Internet about the need for mobile phone access during a movie.
The 'we got along fine without instant connectivity' argument is a counter to the overwrought life-and-death-situation arguments in general. It's not about being a luddite, it's about keeping perspective.
Have another read of my comment, and you'll see in the middle of it that I'm saying that it's an argument of conveniences. It's convenient for a parent to have instant connectivity in case the babysitter calls, just as it's convenient for the audience to enjoy the movie they paid for without distractions. You say the theatre would take a financial hit for installing blocking devices, yet the more common trope is that the major annoyance in a theatre is people on phones - you could just as easily argue that they'd get a financial benefit from it. Doctors specifically on-call to deliver babies aren't much of a market segment to a movie theatre.
> It's not about being a luddite, it's about keeping perspective.
You clearly have no perspective.
I'd prefer my next trauma surgeon can relax and take in half a movie before he is called in on his pager to try and save my life, of which I have one that will be entirely in his hands. I don't give a fuck if you miss a couple of minutes of a movie that cost you $15 or even if it meant myself never being able to go into a movie theater again.
Maybe you care a lot about your life, and thereby about the quality-of-life of trauma surgeons. Do you think the movie theatre does?
What's so wrong with having places that can only be attended by people who are fine with nobody will be able to reach them? Businesses don't have to serve everybody; in fact, selling exactly that escapism--that only people in certain classes and professions can afford the time to experience--is exactly the business model theatres. It is also the business model of cruise-lines and travel agencies.
If a trauma surgeon wants to see a movie, they can wait for it to come out on Netflix. Just so: if a trauma surgeon wants to go to the beach and sip mai-tais, they can find a public one within an hour's drive of the hospital.
(Note that this is all assuming that being on-call is a sensible thing to have in society. We really need to get ourselves enough employed doctors that we can guarantee we'll only need some of them at any given time, so the rest can actually stay home and sleep.)
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I can't wait until movie theaters pop up that advertise walls covered with metallic paint to block cellular RF. As someone who dislikes push notifications and refuses to work in any profession with the concept of being "on call," I will go to those almost all the time. And when my surgeon isn't on call, he'll be even more relaxed!
Thing is, I just can't think of a single scenario where the rights of the many to enjoy uninterrupted entertainment in every theater outweigh the rights of everyone else to be in constant communication with whomever they chose to, for whatever reason they chose to. Regardless if they are a surgeon, parent, or just a loud douchebag in a movie theater.
So until these faraday cage theaters start popping up, if you want the movie theater without the rest of civilization, you'll just have to take a generator and projector to a National Park or start it yourself.
Rights? What rights? You're talking about conveniences here, supplied by a private entity, not rights. You don't have a right to watch a movie with guaranteed phone access any more than you have a right to watch a movie not being illuminated by the bright screen of the phone from some idiot in front of you. You don't even have a right to watch a movie in the first place.
Since we're doing ridiculous hypotheticals here, I'd rather the entire movie theatre having a relaxing, fun time with no interruptions or rude phone users, meaning that they leave the movie happy rather than irritated, less likely to have an accident on the way home and hence need a trauma surgeon in the first place. Ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure and all that.
As for perspective, you are right that life-and-death on-call people should be using pagers rather than phones, but you completely miss the point that you can get pagers that work on a higher frequency than the phone system. Your precious trauma surgeon can still have a pager that works in a theatre while disallowing phone use, since Faraday cages can be tuned to work on different frequencies. Pagers should be used because a pager service comes with a guaranteed SLA, and SMS services do not.
And frankly, I don't give a fuck about your ignorance, just don't use it to angrily insult me when I've done nothing to you.
If a movie theatre did in fact install jammers each parent concerned about their kid (yea, it's probably not a true emergency, but subjective perception matters) or each doctor (I'm thinking more about delivering babies, which can mean being on call for weeks at a time, than an ER doctor) might choose to skip the movie. The end result is that that the theatre will likely take a hit on their profits. That's not a compelling reason to invest in installing a jammer.
The whole "we survived just fine without constant connectivity" argument is flawed. Yea, we did a lot of things without modern technology. We got along fine without movies, driving to the movies, mobile phones, the Internet, or arguing on the Internet about the need for mobile phone access during a movie.