Devices Enforce Cellular Silence, Sweet but Illegal - New York Times
As cellphone use has skyrocketed, making it hard to avoid hearing half a conversation in many public places, a small but growing band of rebels is turning to a blunt countermeasure: the cellphone jammer, a gadget that renders nearby mobile devices impotent.
The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States — prompting scrutiny from federal regulators and new concern last week from the cellphone industry. The buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers and, increasingly, commuters on public transportation.
The development is creating a battle for control of the airspace within earshot. And the damage is collateral. Insensitive talkers impose their racket on the defenseless, while jammers punish not just the offender, but also more discreet chatterers.
Horsecrap. Buy some earplugs if it bothers you so much. What if you were annoyed by two people talking to each other in your vicinity. What are you going to do? Go bash them with a hammer?
Luddite creeps.
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What if you were annoyed by two people talking to each other in your vicinity.
It’s a curiously easier for me and perhaps for most to mentally block out a two-sided conversion.
Mark Twain:
Most of the objections are rooted in this effect, I suspect.
Another issue is one of politeness. When in direct in person conversion with someone, if their cell phone rings, people seem to feel it’s necessary to have a conversation with the caller and ignore the person physically present. Is it anti-technology to prioritize physical presense? Perhaps, but it is also arguably impolite.
Outside in a public place, absolutely not. But when I pay $14 for a movie and $37 for a bag of soggy popcorn, the last thing I want is some jackass yapping away about his girlfriend’s problems.
I’d pay extra $ to see a movie in a theater that jammed cell phone signals.
A lot of people would pay extra to live in a community that banned your ownership of firearms, Robb.
I don’t go to that many movie theaters any more - but the ones I do visit, here in SF where I believe you are legally required to own at least two cellphones at all times - don’t seem to me to be especially plagued by this dire threat.
Of course, when I started going to movies, the greasers (not a derogatory term for Mexicans in those days, but a description of the duck-tailed crowd) used to sit in the balcony and pitch their ice-filled cups, usually drained of liquid, over the railing onto the crowds below.
When I’m in a restaurant or theater and my phone rings, there’s not much talking. “What the hell do you want? Call back in two hours.” Of course I say the same thing when I’m at home eating or watching a good movie and on occasion while reading a good book. If I bother to answer.
Quick, the problem is the lack of civility exhibited by many cell users. Its damn rude to:
- yap away in a theatre.
- drone on at a play,
- speak incessantly in libraries.
Boils down to the idea that one person thinks their constant talking supersedes the rights of others in their vicinity. I would also hazard that for many the talk is of little value other than to hear them talk.
Just opinion of course.
So for your own personal preferences you will put at risk people with pacemakers, and folks with their cellphones monitoring elderly or other medical alarms at a distance? How about 911 calls? How about calls to medical, police, or fire personnel from their services?
Or is your only concern your personal irritation about what is, after all, a rather minor problem, blown into huge proportions by folks who apparently don’t have much of a sense of proportion?
Here’s a prediction: In the not too distant future, PANs (Personal Area Networks - the bluetooth and other wireless connectivity you carry on your person most of the time - a lot of it concerned with medical monitoring of one kind or another) will be so valuable there will be huge penalties for interfering with them at all.
During one of Brenda’s pregnancies, I took her in for some test or other. While waiting — and we waited a long time, natch — we were seated across a hallway from another couple evidently in for the same kind of thing, since the woman was about five months gone. These two spent the entire time glued to their cell phones. To judge by the halves of the conversations we were forced to overhear, they were such as no civilized person would endure: They were strident, overbearing, obnoxious to every person to whom they spoke, and they visited the ugliness of it upon every person in the facility. They kept on calling, too: As soon as one call was over, they’d rush to dial in the next. After a while, I leaned to Brenda and asked her, “Do you suppose they put those phones down to screw?”
No, the problem is lack of civility, period. Cell phone use is only a symptom.
And my problem is with the hidden nature of the force used to “solve” the problem. If you want to post signs and make darned sure everybody in the area understands that their cell phones won’t work because they are being electronically suppressed, so that people can choose, fine.
But if somebody tried to call me on my cell to tell me my wife had been in an accident and had only a short time to live, and I needed to come immediately…
And that call was suppressed by some electronic prig who was just overjoyed with his personal solution to a problem most people don’t think is very major - not by polls, but by how they act in real life.
And I found out too late, and my wife died before I could get to her.
And I then discovered the identity of the prig.
I would hurt him. Badly.
We live in an era of network connectivity. It’s going to become more pervasive, not less. (Yes, a cell phone is a node of network access….)
What if no cell phones were involved? What if their conversation, which you were “forced to overhear, had not involved a cell phone, but was merely between the two of them? You couldn’t jam that. What then? Shoot them?
Clayton, you do have the right of it, in that it’s not the phone, it’s the user. But the solution is not surreptitious jamming. In fact, if put to a vote, I suspect a large majority would be perfectly happy to impose prison terms on those who indulge in that “solution.” Up to and including a life sentence for those who caused the death of another in so doing.
A final thought: Say, wouldn’t it have been great if the hijackers on 9/11 had thought to bring along a cellphone jammer on each plane?
Or you wake up in your bed in the dark and hear somebody moving around downstairs. You reach for the phone, and it’s dead. So you reach for your cell phone, and….
It’s jammin’ time!
Around here, I’d reach for the .45 first, and then the phone, but that might not be an option for a lot of people.
In Hong Kong public areas are a constant cacophony of noise, cell phone or not, and in many dialects and languages.
You just learn to tune it out.
Not necessarily. Quite often it’s the bystander aching for something to bitch about. What do you want to bet, the ones floating the idea of jammers bounce up and down and giggle when they’re alone thinking about pushing the button?
It’s really weird to see regular posters to this site acting as if they’re got some kind of right to not be offended or annoyed.
It’s not natural.
My point exactly. I would never expect a movie theater to do so under the table, so to speak. It’s all about choice.
And honestly, the movie theater is about the only place I have an issue with. Of course, I wish the theaters would escort annoying talkers (cell phone or not) or people with crying babies out to the lobby. But they don’t. And so I rarely go to the movies any more.
Personally, I sometimes wonder what all those idiots babbling continuously on their cell phones did before there were cell phones. “I’m getting on the Metro now; I’m getting off the Metro; I’m going into the Mall; I’m coming out of the Mall; yack, yack, blah, blah.”
And why can’t people put the damn things on vibrate mode so I don’t have to listen to the first movement of Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D Minor before the owner wakes up and figures their damn phone is paging them?
Johnmc and Clayton said it, lack of civility or as we called it in the old days, comman courtesy. We have bred several generations of mannerless little animals and they have started biting us on the butt.
I think the marker is a generational one. I automatically assume that when I hear somebody bitching about cell phones - or video games, or ubiquitous computers, or whatever - that they are over forty. Probably well over forty.
I don’t think most of these cellphone babblers regard what they are doing as being rude. It’s just a part of life - the same way smokers didn’t regard smoking as rude, either.
I thought a bit more about networks as I posted this. PANs (Personal Area Networks) are in their infancy, but that is going to change, and change fast. Every new piece of electronics I buy today (I’m looking at a new notebook) I evaluate first for portability (can I carry it with me?) and connectivity (can I be on the net 24-7?) We are probably only a decade from true portable networking, where we will wear computers and accept input from the networks into our skulls via head’s up displays and embedded earplugs. When we reach that point, interfering with somebody’s network access may be regarded with all the kindliness of interfering with their air supply.
No kidding. Kennycan mentioned the “constant cacophony of noise” in HongKong. Try a train ride from there to Guangzhou. Constant cell phone music, every few seconds.
Yes, it’s generational, but the why of it is the lack of awareness by generation X, XI and XII of their impact on others. Too few people under 40 were instructed in what were once called manners when they were young. The lack of consideration for others, lack of propriety in public places, lack of respect for people and private and public property are alien to much of the under 40 crowd, because they never learned it.
I try not to complain too much because there are plenty of members of the over-40 crowd who’ve reverted to the mean, because they’ve forgotten the lessons they were taught at age seven or eight, or think it’s “different” now. Think of Sam Donaldson shouting questions at President Reagan while RR was boarding a helicopter, or “journalists” peppering President Clinton with Monica questions while Clinton is standing alongside foreign heads of state or government in the White House Rose Garden.
The reason the self centered behavior continues (and gets worse) is that nobody challenges it. Theaters won’t send burly ushers up to the phone talkers to ask them to talk in the lobby, Clinton wouldn’t dress down the press, ministers won’t ask church attendees in shorts and flip flops to leave (though the Vatican still does), or even ask loud, laughing attendees in a chapel waiting for a funeral service to keep it down (my most recent experience). Nobody want to be seen as the bad guy.
Until individuals, especially leaders, start speaking up and pointing out when behavior is inconsiderate and/or inappropriate, that behavior is going to get worse, or at least never get better. I’d rather see individuals and leaders speaking up than give nanny-staters an excuse for more legislation. We need a lot more “How dare you”’s than we’re getting.
I think you’ve got it backwards, Lorenzo. “Manners” are a cultural artifact. As I pointed out, at one time, because the majority of people smoked, it was not considered “rude” to smoke in the presence of others - unless, of course, they objected. Today, it is a crime in many places, and rudeness is reserved for things like not dropping your trash in the proper recycling receptacle - a notion you probably consider ludicrous.
Manners change from generation to generation. What tomorrow’s generation thinks is rude will differ greatly from today’s - or yesterday’s.
I can pretty much guarantee you that cell phone blabbering won’t be considered rude, and folks who object to it will be regared as fogies at best, and nuts at worst. Almost by definition, the older generation fails in efforts to impose its “manners” on the younger.
There’s a difference between its manners and any manners. It is not that these persons lack a particular set of manners; they have no manners at all.
I see what you’re saying, Bill, but I think you’re describing “manners” as social convention that changes, and I’m contending that some things, like being considerate of other people, treating others as you would like to be treated, are values, not social or generational fads.
Even Miss Manners will concede that some rules for living are social constructs designed to make human interaction easier and more predictable, and must change as society changes. I doubt though that she would ever agree that consideration of others or showing respect for the dead are things that ever would or should go out of style.
Just for the record, Bill, I played what was probably one of the first commercially installed video games. It was called “Pong”, and it was somewhere around 1973.
That stands up well, though, only in a classless society. Pretty much by definition, the Golden Rule doesn’t apply to anyone “special.”
Isn’t that the one that goes “He who has the gold, rules”?
I never heard of “jammers” before, but this is a very interesting group of comments.
If one’s phone is “jammed”, how long does the “jamming last”? One minute… two minutes… an hour?
Could someone leave a jammer on and walk a block and jam all phones in a 30 foot radius…. and the “jammed” phones at the beginning of the block resume working by the time the “strolling jammer” reached the other end of the block?
Would jammers affect cordless hand held phones?
Would jammers affect traditional corded telephones?
In other words, is the “jamming” the equivalent of a dropped call?
Do jammers work continuously or only at the moment the jammers button is pushed?
Are the phones in the 30 foot radius permanently ruined?
Why would frequencies used by cell phones, which are apparently the ones the “jammers” interrupt… bother other things such as the cited “pace makers” etc?
What other commonly used items operate on the same frequencies as cell phones?
Do these items interfere with cell phone use by taking up space (term?) in the frequency band?
There seem to be some knowledgeable people here that could address these admittedly technical type questions from a novice… but I would appreciate knowing the true facts about these items.
Thank you for an factual information.