Although marginally less dangerous, mobile phones are in many ways similar to the six-guns of the American Wild West. Everybody packs them these days. Some people even wear them in hip holsters. And of course, since the addition of the built-in camera, phones are increasingly used to shoot things, Frank McNallyobserves.
As with guns in the old west, quickness on the draw with a mobile is much admired. Good texting technique can be a social-life-or-death matter. But in certain pressurised situations - table quizzes, for example - a team member with a fast thumb, good contacts, and the ability to make snap decisions in a crisis can be invaluable.
The gun/phone comparison is particularly striking when people enter a modern-day saloon. The first thing they do, often, is to take their mobiles out and put them on the table. This is partly to prevent accidents: some of those hair-trigger Nokias can go off in your pocket and photograph your leg if you're not careful. But putting your mobile on the table is also a way of letting everybody know you're serious. The message is that you have a phone, and you're prepared to use it if necessary.
Like mobiles now, guns in the Wild West had an element of fashion about them. By the 1880s, many US newspapers were decrying the custom whereby every cowboy packed a six-shooter for no good reason. The risks involved in simultaneously carrying lethal weapons and drinking whiskey was especially deplored. Eventually, some "cow towns" took to banning guns within their limits.
The latter trend is dramatised in Clint Eastwood's film The Unforgiven, in which Gene Hackman deservedly won an Oscar for his portrayal of Little Bill Daggett, sheriff of Big Whiskey. Little Bill polices the town's gun ban with the enthusiasm of a pychopath, as in a scene where he is accused of beating up an innocent man. "Innocent!" he sneers. "Innocent of what?"
I'm getting away from the subject of telephony here, but not entirely, because we know that the combination of alcohol and mobile phones is dangerous too. Texts fired off in the heat of the moment can end up in court - or, even worse, in the tabloids.
And there are other risks. It is surely only a matter of time before some crazed actor is pushed over the edge by an audience member's badly timed ring-tone. Imagine it happening during the dagger scene in Macbeth, or the bloodbath at the end of Hamlet, and you can see how phone users at the theatre are flirting with disaster.
It's just fortunate that the plot of Long Day's Journey Into Nightdoes not require the cast to be armed, or the recent production at the Gaiety might not have passed without loss of life. Alcohol may have been a factor in so many people forgetting to switch their phones off, because the theatre in question allows drinks to be taken into the auditorium, once "decanted" into plastic glasses. And fair enough: given that the production was four-and-a-half hours long, I might have decanted myself. I've attended weddings that were shorter.
Speaking of which, I was at a wedding reception a while back where an even more egregious example of phone use occurred. First, and for a time mysteriously, it appeared that the best man's speech was attracting occasional wolf-whistles - low but audible - of the kind normally associated with the collision of short skirts and building sites.
This was puzzling. Nothing the speaker said (or wore) seemed to merit such a reaction. And it was even odder when the whistling continued into the speech by the father of the bride. Then, just as the latter was paying a moving tribute to absent loved ones, including his late wife, a voice at the table next to me said: "Hello? Hello? I can't talk, I'm at a wedding."
Those of us within earshot turned to the speaker as one. And if looks could have killed, he would have died instantly. But the man was bullet-proof. Not only did he appear oblivious to the stares, he carried on receiving text messages. The next time we heard the wolf-whistle, we knew where to look - and, sure enough, it was our friend's message alert. This was not some bored teenager, by the way: he was 60 if he was a day.
That's when it struck me that, rather than simply asking people to switch off before films or plays or speeches, we may need more of a Big Whiskey approach to phone control.
Of course, the right to bear phones is a cornerstone of our democracy, and people would not give it up easily. I note that Comreg has rebuffed the idea of a signal block in theatres as an unacceptable intrusion on consumer rights. So any attempt to seize phones - even, say, from a ballet audience member who takes a call during the death scene in Swan Lake, would probably be unpopular with the civil liberties lobby.
The backlash against unacceptable mobile use is still in its early stages. Swedish public transport has set up phone-free areas, but only in certain parts of the bus or train. With similar moderation, the phone-free restaurant movement now growing in the US settles for customers switching to silent.
But I see that since August - following an incident in which a minister had his mobile on during a discussion of state security, the Israeli cabinet now requires members attending meetings to leave their phones at the door. I can see this becoming a trend.