Wedding guests and cell phones

Our wedding is going to be a pretty casual affair. That said, I really hate the idea of someone texting or tweeting or facebooking or blogging from their phone during our ceremony and reception. I hadn't really thought of this until reading Sara's blog post about attending a traditional church wedding and seeing the person next to her "bent over his cell phone, sending text messages to his friend." Eek!

There are several sort of "organic" things we are doing to avoid seeing our friends with phones in hands during the ceremony, including making the ceremony short and sweet, and making it funny and touching - in other words, worth paying attention to.

I thought about having our officiant at the beginning ask everyone to take out their cell phones and turn them off - but a lot of my friends' phones are also their cameras, and since we're not having a photographer I don't want to potentially lose photos. Even if they are of poor quality!


Besides, I kind of hate telling people what to do, and for the same reason, I don't want to have a bunch of "no cell phone" signs around. At the same time its something that would really bother me, it has a high potential of happening, and it's something we could potentially prevent.
Any ideas?


I just found this option online, but apparantly jamming cell phone signals is illegal, and potentially unsafe. I'd hate to be the reason someone couldn't call 911 in a nearby building!