Lights, Camera, Smartphones! Why multi-screening is driving me nuts.
Smartphones are everywhere. Joni Mitchell, one of the most well-known folk singers of the 20th century posed an important question in 1970, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?” I wonder what Joni would say about the 21st-century movie viewing experience.
You might have heard the noise back in April 2016 when AMC Theater CEO Adam Aron suggested in a Variety Magazine interview that they might allow texting in theaters. Quickly AMC spokesman Ryan Noonan, responded to the backlash and announced that there was no specific timeframe for a test that would allow texting in the dark.
No bright screens allowed in a dark theater sounds like a good standard to uphold. In a Rolling Stone online article from October 2013 Alamo Drafthouse Theater CEO Tim League said, “Over my dead body will I introduce texting into the movie theater…it’s our job to understand that this is a sacred space and we have to teach manners.”
Not everyone sees the movie theater as a sacred space. When the AMC story went viral, one opinionist, Amber Jamieson, from The Guardian suggested that “Going to the movie theater doesn’t have to be like a visit to a holy temple…Allowing cellphones-in certain screenings, in certain movies-is just another re-imagining of what a cinema experience can be.”
The cinema experience is definitely being challenged to reinvent itself and hopefully bring back a pre-streaming level of audience attendance. Movie theaters must be feeling the disruptive noise coming from on-demand providers like Apple TV, Netflix, HBO NOW, Amazon Prime and Hulu. It’s nice to think about families with bowls of popcorn being entertained together. Unfortunately, that’s not the case in 2018. We have all been there when watching a show with one or more people and someone, maybe even you, whip out a phone and get sucked into scrolling. It might start innocently with the question, “What is that actor’s name?” and then, suddenly, you go from searching on IMDb to responding to an email to ordering groceries on Instacart. Then, you look around and find you are not alone. Or rather, you are alone because instead of enjoying time connecting around what is playing on the one screen, all of you are now face down focused on your personal screens.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could focus on whatever is right in front of us without that glowing screen calling our names? Laughing together, holding hands, hugging during a suspenseful scene and talking during commercials might soon be behaviors of the past.
Try this…next time you are watching something on one big screen together, set out a basket or a box so everyone in your party can drop their smartphones in before the show begins. No pressure. If you need to answer a call or text, reach in and grab it. With the basket there, you have a chance to change the scene from screen zombies isolated on their phones to a real human hang out.
Adam Alter, author of the book Irresistible suggests that “there should be times of the day where it looks like the 1950s or where you are sitting in a room and you can’t tell what era you are in. You shouldn’t always be looking at screens.”
Our smartphones have disrupted human relationships the same way Uber disrupted the taxicab industry. Sherry Turkle, the author of Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, has been warning us since 2011 that when we are distracted by our phones, we “pay insufficient attention to one another, creating increasingly shallow relationships.” Looking where we are 7 years later, there is no question that Turkle was right and the repercussions can be felt everywhere.
Joni Mitchell warned us too. Over the past 8 years, there has been a lot of paving over paradise and putting up parking lots (another reference to Big Yellow Taxi-1970). We do benefit from technological advancement and innovation. Still, we benefit even more from a deep human connection. Hang on tight to holding hands, hugs of support, smiles of encouragement, glances of understanding…none of these can be downloaded from the App Store.
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