Agreed. People being awful in theaters has been a long-standing subject of countless jokes. It’s not in any way a new phenomenon. “Please silence your phone” adverts after the trailers happened long before Covid came around.
Comment on Chaos in the aisles: has cinema etiquette reached an all-time low?
Bye@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The author can’t really be implying that in 4 years, many people somehow forgot movie etiquette. Are we really that eager to infantilize people, implying they have the memory of a goldfish? That they have suddenly become ok answering the phone in a quiet theater, and weren’t before?
No, the world has always been full of some fraction of dumb people. If we accept that rudeness is a random variable with some central tendency toward common decency, we must accept that there is a left tail to that distribution, composed of crude jerks.
These people have always been among us. And perhaps in the comfort of our own home theaters, private screening rooms, and bedtime laptop cinema adventures, we forgot about the jerks.
There’s a reason home video became so popular in the post VCR world. There have always been those who talk through films, throw popcorn, and yell at the screen “oh no don’t go in there!” We just forgot about them in those 4 years. They didn’t go anywhere.
akintudne@reddthat.com 10 months ago
Zalack@startrek.website 10 months ago
I don’t know. This would dovetail well with a bunch of studies that have found verbal and physical abuse of retail workers at an all time high since the pandemic. Similar studies have found the same thing for road rage.
There has always been some fraction of poorly behaved people, but that fraction seems to have become larger since the pandemic, whatever the actual mechanism that caused it is.