Yuen: Has Coldplay couple’s scandal gone cold? Minnesota Twins want to know.

Will we still be talking about the couple caught canoodling at the Coldplay concert more than a week after it happened?

The folks in charge of keeping us entertained at Minnesota Twins games want to know. The team hosts its first home game after the All-Star break on Friday.

“It definitely caught the world by storm,” said Sam Henschen, who oversees the Twins’ video board operations and other aspects of the game-day experience. “Me and my counterparts are asking, how can we piggyback off of this? When we come back on Friday, will it be old news? We’re kind of debating that right now. Do we lean into that thing?”

The Coldplay fan-cam controversy has launched a thousand spoofs and worldwide ridicule. If you’ve somehow escaped the viral moment, a camera from last week’s concert in Massachusetts zoomed into a couple in warm embrace who quickly panicked when they realized their images were being beamed onto the jumbotron.

He was Andy Byron, the now-resigned CEO of New York-based software development company Astronomer. Married with kids, Byron ducked. She was Kristin Cabot, the company’s human resources director, who covered her face and turned her back to the camera. She has also resigned.

The Philadelphia Phillies made national news when the baseball team’s green fuzzy mascots re-enacted the awkward moment, and other sports teams followed with their own parodies. Memes of the incident are breaking the internet. You can safely bet the “Coldplay Kiss Cam Couple” will be a popular costume this Halloween.

The apparent scandal united a divided country. Why has it captured so much of our attention?

“If they would have just acted normal, ‘Yeah, we’re together,’ it wouldn’t be a thing,” he said. “The reaction is what got people talking, which is why fan cams, and kiss cams in particular, resonate. You’re watching for people’s reactions to seeing themselves on the board, and that’s what drives the interest.”

The kiss cam is believed to have been around since the 1980s as giant video screens became more common at sporting events. The camera operator zeroes in on two people who appear to be romantically paired, and the couple are expected to kiss on demand for a stadium packed with strangers. The audience roars approval if they kiss, and often boos if they refuse. It’s like hazing, but more wholesome.

Not all professional sports teams offer this tradition (the Wild and the Timberwolves do not). Couples targeted by the Twins’ kiss cam have responded in wildly divergent ways, with some romantically performing a ballroom dance dip for the camera and others flipping the bird.

I tell Henschen that I find the ritual to be a throwback to a different time. Sure, it’s a bit endearing and sweet. Definitely weird.

“Correct!” he agrees. “All those things are true. There are people who love it, people who hate it, and a whole range in between.”

When the kiss cam gets it wrong, you tend to remember. Sometimes it homes in on co-workers, strangers or siblings. The camera might then shift one person to the left or right and end up with the proper match.

Minnesota’s most viral kiss-cam moment came on Valentine’s Day 2014 at a Gophers hockey game, when a man found himself on the kiss cam while seated next to a woman. He came prepared, pulling a homemade sign out of his pocket and displaying it for the camera. The arrow on the sign pointed to the woman, along with the words, “My sister.”

The Coldplay couple have endured universal mockery, and most of us don’t feel too bad. We laugh at the memes because it makes us feel a little more decent in regards to our own moral standing. We would be wracked with guilt if we were cheating on our partners, unable to eat or sleep or show our faces in public. We would never expect privacy at a stadium of 50,000 people, because we are not narcissists.

Even when a fake apology from Byron was circulated online, in which he purportedly complained about becoming a spectacle without his consent, it was just absurd enough for some of us to assume it was true. The algorithms want us to get our fix of outrage. Nonetheless, the incident has raised deeper questions about the need for limits on public surveillance and global shaming. And yes, both trends have gone too far.

The truth is we consent to have our image and likeness captured and photographed whenever we purchase a ticket to a major sporting event or concert. (Just read the fine print on your ticket confirmation.) Our faces and actions are recorded by doorbell cameras. We are tracked by the phones in our pockets. We willingly surrender our privacy to social media giants.