TT: The vexing texters

Last May, I found myself seated for the first time behind a philistine who sent a text message in the middle of a show that I was reviewing. She got off lucky–I wasn’t armed. Like most civilized folk, I take a hard line on texting during performances. But given the fast-increasing ubiquity of texting, I suspect that we’re on a slippery slope here, and so do a number of performing-arts organizations that are starting to experiment with organized texting during performances.
Texting has already been used to poll audiences and let them pick an encore, or choose between alternative endings for a play. Might this be a desirable step toward heightening an audience’s involvement in a performance? Or the thin end of a social wedge whose unintended consequences could be highly undesirable? I’ll attempt to sort out some possible answers to this tricky question in my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.