Cell phone culture

Nobody could have predicted...

The Inquirer reports that cell phones are presenting a problem at the Philadelphia Orchestra:

Another orchestra season, another soul-killing cell phone interruption. As banal as it may be, Saturday night’s mid-Bruckner cell phone incident at the Philadelphia Orchestra is a painful thing to ponder, a kind of musicus interruptus from which a performance never really recovers.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin wasn’t asking for anything unreasonable when he once again suggested to the audience that maybe they could live without cell phones for an hour.

But it’s not the audience’s fault, not entirely. The responsibility for cell phone peace also rests with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center, Inc., which has invited the problem at least partially by asking audiences to more deeply engage with their cell phones during visits.

Tagging the ensemble on social media has long been encouraged. Signs at one recent performance asked patrons to bypass printed programs and instead read their program notes online. And soon it will no longer be possible for ticket buyers to print out tickets at home. As of Oct. 29, Kimmel and orchestra customers can still get tickets printed by the Kimmel, but instead of showing ushers tickets printed at home, they must present e-tickets — on their cell phones.

POKC president and CEO Matías Tarnopolsky said he didn’t think asking people to use their cell phones for some things at concerts while keeping them silent sent a mixed message.

“I don’t think that’s too much to ask,” he said Monday, “even if you’re asking them to show their tickets and read their program notes on the phone as well.”

But, really, it is too much to ask. An orchestra, a cinema, an art museum, cannot ask people to use their cell phones for these things - indeed, we will make it so you need to use them for these things - but to on no account allow them to use them for any other things. It is just not something we can do. It’s like inviting someone for whom alcohol should play no part in their lives to have just one drink, a small one. Cell phones are addictive. The apps and media we have on them are addictive by design. And so once a phone is out it is very, very hard to put it away. You cannot ask people to read program notes on their phones and then hope that will be the end of it until the final applause has ended. It has to be all or nothing.

Art requires focus. Cell phones - again, by the design of their applications - demand that we not focus on some other thing, a performance, a painting, a meal, and instead turn our attention to the device. We don’t need phones during a performance (I’ll except a uniquely talented surgeon requiring some sort of paging device in the event of a life-threatening emergency). But there they are, and arts presenters, as many high schools have come to learn, need to simply ban them, even at the expense of printing paper programs and tickets.

This is not a “get off my lawn” rant at kids today. I have a phone - of course I do - and it exerts the same pull on me as on any seventeen-year old, to the point where I have to make the conscious decision to simply put it away for periods where my attention should be elsewhere, on the book I am reading, on the trail I am hiking.

Arts organizations got on a kick of engagement some years ago, and the idea that electronic devices could help with that, especially in appealing to the youngs. They do the opposite, we have less engagement, and I think this was predictable. The remedy? Strong statements from presenters that phones are to be turned off, and no part of the visiting experience that would ever entail an audience member to have to turn their phones on. Cold turkey.