IN her timely and insightful article (“New phone mode for cinema may have merit”, The Herald, January 9) Marianne Taylor makes a number of observations on theatre or cinema attendance with which it is difficult not to agree. In particular the problem of multiple users of iPhones, during a screening or performance, seems to be becoming a major irritant. I agree with her that the Apple iPhone “theatre mode” initiative is more likely to legitimise phone use in the theatre environment, than to improve the theatre experience. Surely the rights of the paying customers to enjoy what they have paid to see or hear, namely a performance, is superior to those of the phone users who can access their phones at any time, preferably elsewhere. Is it not the theatre proprietors’ responsibility to uphold these rights?
It is not so difficult, technically, to provide blanket suppression of mobile phones within a confined space.
The easiest method, in principle, is to covert the theatre enclosure into a Faraday cage which entails covering walls and ceilings with an electrically conductive lining. Developments in this direction are well advanced but the technique is probably more suitable to smaller, more regular, spaces such as halls and meeting rooms, where acoustics are not an issue.
Alternatively, all theatres and meeting places could be licensed to install, if they so desire, radio wave transmitters directed to irradiate the auditorium with low-level microwaves. If modulated with noise and tuned to transmit at mobile phone frequencies these interference signals will swamp the genuine signals passing through the theatre, which have been generated by the mobile phone companies. The main difficulty of such a scheme is that radio waves reflecting off solid walls can create “quiet zones” where phones may escape suppression.
An even more effective solution would be the installation of an elementary coded radio transmitter, rather than one modulated with noise. If all mobile phones are then adjusted to recognise this code, a technically simple operation, all that is then necessary is for manufacturers to implement a relatively routine electronic adjustment to all phones to make them immobilise themselves on receipt of the code. Immobilsation would continue until the phone is removed from the radio coded space. The power required to do this within a confined enclosure would be very small and the technique could be used in any location where social intercourse occurs.
Unfortunately it will take legislation both to allow such transmitters to be installed, and to require mobile phone manufacturers to adjust their devices to respond to the transmitted immobilisation codes. But even so, this still seems to represent a surer route to theatre “peace” than expecting “theatre mode” to inculcate socially responsible behaviour into all users when entering a gathering place such as a cinema.
Alan J Sangster,
37 Craigmount Terrace, Edinburgh.
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