Last week a rumour emerged from the tech world concerning a plan by Apple to introduce a controversial new feature in their next iPhone update. 'Theater Mode' would allow users to access their phones in cinemas while causing less annoyance to their fellow audience members.
Phone use in cinemas is a growing menace, so anything that might reduce the annoyance is to be welcomed, but we simply can't see how this could possibly work - surely if you can see your screen so can those seated around you? Of course, we're movie geeks, not tech nerds, so we'll just have to wait to see how this works.
We wanted to gauge the reaction to this news among our readers - as devoted a group of movie lovers as you could hope to find - so we ran a poll on our twitter page, and the result was pretty unanimous.
Apple are rumoured to introduce a 'theater mode' in their next iphone update to facilitate phone use in cinemas. Is this a good or bad move?— TheMovieWaffler.com (@themoviewaffler) January 7, 2017
Now you have to remember that our twitter followers are mostly committed cinephiles who visit the cinema regularly. Had the poll been voted on by more casual cinema-goers it may have produced different results.
Many of you commented on the poll, mostly to express outright rage at the idea of allowing phone use in a cinema. Among the small few who voted in favour of Apple's update, there was a shared notion of "Does my checking my phone a couple of times during a two hour movie really annoy you that much?" Well, frankly, yes it does, because it's not just one person checking their phone - in a large auditorium you could have an audience of a thousand viewers. If a tenth of that audience decides to check their phones just once, that's 100 moments of distracting beams of light during the movie.
In too many aspects of contemporary society, we're normalising narcissism rather than confronting it, so sadly Apple's rumoured plan seems all too inevitable.