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Around 2014 I was invited to a birthday party. The party location was in a cellar bar in a narrow side street in the medieval city center. In the bar was absolu
by omnibrain 4y ago
Around 2014 I was invited to a birthday party. The party location was in a cellar bar in a narrow side street in the medieval city center. In the bar was absolutely no cell reception and even if you ascended the stairs and went infront of the door you only had Edge. There was no Wifi.
It felt magical. Like the parties we had in the before smartphone era. Each gust arrived their phone in their hand, noticed that there is absolutely no reception and just put it away. So people talked, joked and debated. With anyone staring at their phone.
- mcast 4y agoThis would be a really nice restaurant/bar idea, too bad cell phone jammers are illegal in the US. Maybe you could layer your walls with foil to naturally block antennas?
- deebosong 4y agoMaybe this could be like, neo brutalism. Purposefully use materials in locations that are cel reception dead zones. If you wanna get all covert & secret agent ish, then have data harvesting agents plant lil doohickeys that extend range lol. Now you got some neo noir sci-fi cyberpunk espionage actions a-brewin.
- throwaway1777 4y agoThey do stuff like this at defcon
- gessha 4y agoSo like, build a bar out of whatever they use in Walmart or BJs. I swear every time I go to one of them, my phone loses its mind and I’m forced to use their wifi.
- fwlr 4y agoThere are bars with Faraday cages built into the walls to achieve this effect, here’s one https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-36943686.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-36943686.amp It seems like it’s probably legal. Might want to provide a reception-available area to give people the option of stepping out to check their phone, similar to a smoking area.
- kibwen 4y agoTo really drive home the point, make the phone area also an actual smoking area.
- actionfromafar 4y agoI know it's not good in aggregate, but I miss smokey bars, even though I don't smoke myself. The smoke made everything look sort of softer, and the smoke hid some other odours of bars. :-) There was also a defacto "tradition" on campus, you saw coats and shirts on balconies and then you knew they'd been to a bar last night. :-D
- BurningFrog 4y agoSmokers, while smoking, are also great company. They're so happy...
- jhugo 4y agoI thought I did too, but now I live somewhere where there are plenty of smoky bars, and the novelty wore off quickly. It's just a pain having to deal with clothes drenched in smoke after an evening out, when you have experienced not ever having to deal with that. Knowing that all bars are smokefree is much easier than having to remember which ones are and which aren't.
- actionfromafar 4y agoOr you did miss it, and now you don't.
- kibwen 4y agoAFAIK, while active signal jammers are illegal, passive signal jammers are legal. You should be fine just covering your walls in chickenwire (though this works for wifi frequencies, not sure about cellular frequencies).
- joshspankit 4y agoMesh blocks everything as long as the holes in the mesh are no larger than 1/10th of the wavelength
- jsjohnst 4y agoNo, the mesh doesn’t block everything. In the case of using your rule of thumb (1/10th wavelength), it’ll reduce the signal strength by about 33db if my math is right.
- silisili 4y agoSounds nice, but it shouldn't take -that- for people to interact with each other. It's so incredibly rude to dick with your phone at a gathering of friends, yet so common, especially among but not exclusive to younger people. I went to a small superbowl gathering once with some folks I didn't know(friends of friend), where the host quite literally spent the entire time on their phone, reading twitter. They'd announce "someone posted 'x'" about a play or commercial. The others would feign laughter, then go back to playing with their phones until they heard cheering or laughing. I left at halftime in disbelief people operated this way.
- joshspankit 4y ago> It's so incredibly rude Rudeness is subjective and based on implied social agreements that a) change, and b) are not as universal as they are assumed to be. Based on my personal experience I can agree that if someone uses their phone in a gathering of people it can disconnect them from those people, and that some people see “choosing to disconnect” as disrespectful, but I think that to unilaterally call that disconnection rude is to ignore the world we’re currently living in as well as the legitimate chance that those people are addicted beyond their control.
- JasonFruit 4y agoThis is a generic argument that could be used anytime a negative word is deployed. "That's just the world we live in, and they might not be able to help it, poor dears!" It's so soft it's difficult to find a hard point to attach an argument to, "nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," rewritten in warm spit.
- rtpg 4y agoThis is definitely dependent on the group of people, but if you have like 2 or 3 people doing it, everyone ends up doing it. Nobody wants to talk to a person on their phone, even if they can multitask
- jjulius 4y agoI guess I'm equally surprised that people on a forum built around an industry that relies on people being glued to these devices are surprised, in 2023, that the industry has succeeded in that effort.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> It felt magical. Like the parties we had in the before smartphone era This comment feels very foreign to me. Very rarely do I encounter someone so glued to their phone that they can't interact at a social event. Usually that person doesn't engage much with other people and eventually stops getting invited to future events because they're simply not showing any interest in socializing. I don't even understand how someone works their way into a friend group if they're too attached to their phone to be socializing. It's weird to hear about groups of friends who are all so attached to their phones that they can't interact unless forcibly separated from them (or from reception). And that's coming from someone with a very tech-heavy group of friends.
- fknorangesite 4y ago> And that's coming from someone with a very tech-heavy group of friends. Ah, but how old are you?
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> Ah, but how old are you? The anecdote in the parent comment was from 2014, nearly a decade ago
- omnibrain 4y ago> Very rarely do I encounter someone so glued to their phone that they can't interact at a social event. It's not like someone doesn't interact at all. But all those tiny distractions went away. No quick glance at a messenger, or social media, or looking something up.
- joseda-hg 4y agoI'll be honest, in my experience, being tech-heavy ≠ tech-dependant, If anything some tech-heavy people are hyper aware of their usage and actively avoid it in social settings
- grecy 4y agoOur local ski resort has no cell reception, and it's magic. When you sit on the charlift you always talk to strangers. In the lodge everyone has their eyes up and is talking, and even when waiting for a lift people actually chat and laugh and joke. I genuinely hope they never build a tower up there.
- IshKebab 4y agoI seriously doubt phone reception is stopping people talking to strangers on ski lifts. People aren't generally on their phones on ski lifts even where there is reception.
- throw_pm23 4y agoI don't have a phone. Every moment is magical :)