There are a few people here. The auditorium probably seats 1,000 people, and I’d guess there are almost 160 seats currently occupied. The speaker tonight is a man by the name of Dr. Martin J. Rutherford, doing a lecture entitled “Modern Inconveniences.” It’s 6:57pm and he goes on at 7:00pm.
Suddenly, he walks out on stage. No drumroll, no gameshow music, no announcer. He is wearing black pants, a white button-up shirt with the top button undone, no tie, and a black (or darkish) blazer. He is a fairly attractive man, with short black hair, and a touch of facial hair along his jawline. Some of the people in the audience clap.
He moves to the podium, thanks the crowd, and takes a small sip of water. He stands at the podium for a few moments shifting papers around and not saying anything. Then:
“Cellphones: devices designed to keep you connected to the rest of the world, made obtainable first around 1983, and commercialized in the early nineties. Parents and adults, can you remember what it was like growing up without cellphones? It seems difficult to imagine now, doesn’t it? Of course, to many of us, the idea was inconceivable back then, but now cellphones are such an integral part of our lives that without them, we feel anxious, uneasy; we are unable to functionally appreciate what is in front of us because we are so concerned with what is being sent to us from long distances. We are so integrated with our cellphones that most of us are unable to contact most of the people we know, our closest friends, unless we have our cellphone with us. Most people no longer memorize phone numbers of friends or family, they just program the numbers into their cellphone contact lists. Land lines are no good, payphones become useless, and friends’ cellphones are all of no help if we really don’t know the numbers of the people we’re trying to reach. It’s kind of pathetic isn’t it? And if the phone gets left in a pants pocket and washed, or left on the bus, or stolen, all the numbers that you didn’t actually know get lost. And it’s quite an inconvenience to try to recover all of them unless you keep an address book at home or in the office.
“Most people leave their cellphones on 24/7. They don’t turn them off for dinner, they keep them on at all times when they’re on “vacation,” and many people are often more concerned about responding to text messages than engaging in and appreciating legitimate social interaction. They are often so absorbed that they are literally unable to react to anything that’s happening around them until they put their phone away. So communication here becomes, at best, halted – an obnoxious, phosphorescent, stuttering, inefficient, busted machine. So often I’ve seen families or groups of friends sitting around a table and instead of interacting with each other, bonding, they’re staring down at their crotches, pressing buttons with their thumbs on their iPhones, BlackBerrys, Droids, Nokias, Go Phones, or whatever. Touching and poking machines instead of sharing stories, laughing, and growing closer. When you spend most of your time on your cellphone, you are not actively experiencing the present. You are not paying attention to what you are hearing, you are not paying attention to who you are with. We are seeing a trend in society with the rise in popularity of cellphones and social networking sites like Facebook of simulated, digital socialization’s gradual replacement of traditional, legitimate socialization.
“Many “smartphones” include GPS systems which allow a person to find their current location and receive step-by-step instruction for how to get from here to any place of their choosing. It’s a fairly useful feature, but unfortunately many people accept it as a complete replacement for the exercising of our mental compasses and internal sense of direction. If you spend all your location-seeking time staring at a cellular device or GPS system, the details of your journey will not carve out space in your mind. If trying to remember where, in a large city, you parked your vehicle, and when you parked it you were not taking real note of street names or landmarks but only following a bulleted list given to you by your iPhone GPS system, you run the risk of sliding into debilitation if your device fails. If something were to happen to damage our phone or our GPS systems, we might be rendered unable to function without panic or freakout. How many of you ever actually look at paper maps?”
A couple of hands go up in the auditorium. One man in the third row’s hand catches Rutherford’s attention. Rutherford asks, “You, sir, still look at paper maps?”
The man responds, “Actually, this isn’t even about the paper maps. Dr. Rutherford, it seems that you’ve got some sort of strange vendetta against cellphones and modern cellular technology! Do you really not believe that society is better off as a result of the technological advances we have experienced? Say my 17-year-old son has a car crash on I-94. Without a cellphone, how would he call me to get help? What if he was so injured that he couldn’t move, and couldn’t drive to a nearby shop or payphone to get help?”
Rutherford hesitated a little bit. People turned in their seats.
“That’s certainly a very good point. Of course, in this case, having a cellphone is a very important thing, and could perhaps even mean the difference in life and death. Of course, other drivers out there are sometimes reckless. Some drive while under the influence. Incidents involving victims of others’ careless behavior are truly tragic. But looking at the flipside, how many times has texting while driving actually been the cause of a car wreck? Is it not possible that a hypothetical elimination of cellphones might increase the net safety rate of society’s automobile usage? Even though you may, while on the road, have your phone responsibly tucked away in your pocket, the driver of the H2 barreling slowly over the median into your lane may actually be having a text-argument with his girlfriend, who cannot talk on the phone because she’s in class. I’d submit that perhaps an elimination of cellphones might actually, overall, reduce the amount of incidents like the hopefully hypothetical? incident you described your son being a part of. Of course, there are some freak accidents that necessitate exceptions, but in general, I believe my position to be very… truthy.”
The man in the third row was silent. And somewhere, back in the seventh row, someone’s cellphone went off.
Rutherford laughed. “How many times have you been in a movie, or seeing a play, or been at some other event and had the momentum completely killed because someone forgot to set their cellphone to vibrate? Or worse, been completely distracted by someone actually answering their cellphone and carrying on a conversation in the middle of the climax of a movie, or in the middle of the second act of some performance of Hamlet, or Proof? How many times have you been sitting in the upper section of a theatre and had the bright rectangles of the cellphones of the people sitting in front of you catch and hold your gaze, distracting you from the film you paid good money to see?” He smirked, “I’m not trying to offend you back there, but your timing could not have been more perfect. Or, I guess, whoever called you’s timing couldn’t have been less perfect.”
“There’s a theatre around here somewhere, I believe it’s on Washington, that has a very interesting and quite blunt disclaimer that they show before their movie screening. One of the managers recorded it himself. It touches on some of the things we’re talking about here, so I thought it would be interesting to show you the clip. So, Mack, I guess let’s go ahead and dim the lights and roll it, if you have it ready.”
The lights dimmed, a digital projector was switched on by remote control, and before the audience on screen was a swaying pan of the projector room in some theatre. Tumultuous Hollywood-esque string music played brightly through the speakers. Film reels roll and whir, and the camera zooms past the projector and down toward the audience through the projecting hole. The camera flies past families eating popcorn and M&M’s, laughing and smiling at the film and at each other, past couples, young, middle-aged and old, some holding hands, some clearly wanting to, and past rows of spiky-haired, buttoned-up polo-shirt-wearing, sun-tanned men and dark-skinned ladies in slim-fitting clothes with their hair put up in all sorts of compelling and interesting ways. The camera swings wide, moving out to the front of the theatre, showing the face of everyone in the audience, and holds there for a second. The music stops. Then, you hear a ringtone from about the 13th row or so, some shitty song from the blackest depths of public radio – and then, “HELLO??!” Everyone in the theatre turns to face him. Eyes wide, every person, in unison, opens his mouth and screams at the phone-user. The owner of the obtrusive cellphone shudders, throwing his hands in front of his face and cowering down in his seat. After a few moments, a manager comes out wearing a black blazer and gold tie, the film stops and the lights come up. The manager moves to the front of the theatre and the camera pans slowly around him, showing both his face and torso and the audience’s facial reaction to him. “Ladies and gentlemen, please, ladies and gentlemen please, let me handle this.”
He clears his throat. Then:
“Sir. Unless you pay attention to the critics’ reviews, or have received advice from your friends, when you come into a movie, you don’t know whether, ultimately, you’re going to be supremely fulfilled or supremely let down. When the directors, producers, cinematographers, actors, set designers, costume designers, screenwriters and everyone else involved get it all down right, they create something truly special, and that something is a gift to you, the viewer. It is transcendence incarnate, the bridging of gaps, a reaching out, a tying of loose ends and a giver of meaning. Some movies will impact you and change the way you think for the rest of your life. And when you spend an inordinate amount of time in a movie talking, loudly crunching food, sneezing, coughing, making stupid noises, moaning, using your cellphone, making out (or more), you are taking that precious gift and desecrating it. In a movie, you may see characters in it played by actors who you have seen in other movies. Making such observations aloud does not make you seem intelligent. Most people have memory and the ability to recognize; these actors, this is their job. If they want to make money, they’re going to try to get into as many movies as they can. Again, this is not remarkable. We are lucky enough if we can get through a movie without some idiot infant screaming because his idiot mother forgot to pack the bottle, and forgot all common courtesies and film etiquette and brought her stupid restless child to the theatre – we don’t need your outbursts, ambient sounds, attempts at humor or at securing sex for later in the night, nor to see the glare of your mobile devices, nor to hear your Top 40 pop song ringtones. If you find yourself unable to satisfy these requests, we ask that you exit the theater. Any door, any time, and the sooner, the better. Thank you all for your patience and understanding. Please, make accommodations if necessary, and do please enjoy the rest of your film.”
DON’T RUIN IT FOR EVERYONE ELSE appears on the screen in bold white letters on a black background.
The video fades out.
Rutherford starts to speak, with a smile. “Clearly a somewhat ridiculous and over-the-top portrayal of the frustration felt with people who answer their phones in the theatre. But haven’t we all felt that frustration? Isn’t it so very, very inconsiderate and rude to behave in such a distracting manner? I’ve been all but driven away from the theatre because it’s such a problem these days. It’s a waste of money if you aren’t allowed to enjoy what you’ve paid for.
“Anyway, I’m about out of time up here. The next speaker is supposed to be on stage at 7:30, I believe? Yes, 7:30. Does anyone have any final questions before I exit?”
A woman in the seventh row raises her hand and says, with a smirk, “Yes, could you tell us how you were initially contacted to be invited to speak to us this evening?”
Without missing a beat, Rutherford retorts “By email. I answered it at my house on my Dell computer two weeks ago. In one efficient response, we had all the details planned out.”
The woman kind of snorts, puts her fist under her chin, and shakes her head a little bit.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for having me this evening, and I hope you, and all your sons and daughters have a safe drive home.” He walks off the stage to the sound of some of the audience’s claps.
Needing to leave, I head for the door in the back of the auditorium. Passing some of the audience members who were staying for the next mini-lecture, I make out some of their remarks.
“What a complete crackpot. He’s probably neo-Amish or something.”
“I thought what he said was actually quite interesting. I wish things now were more like the 50’s, where people spent more time actually talking face-to-face.”
Also, “He was kind of cute. Do you think he has a problem with contraception technology, too?” There were giggles.
I step out under the awning and call my friend Ryan. “Hey Ryan, I’m at the auditorium. Think you could give me a ride by to my apartment?”
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