INATTENTION BLINDNESS

Here I go again. Here comes another of those pieces from one of my favourite hobbyhorses: technology and stupid behaviour.

The New York Times today rekindled my anger with a piece headlined “Walking while talking on your phone? Watch out,”

According to the Consumer Product Safety Association more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms as a result of injuries sustained walking while talking on their cell phones. (U.S. figures) I’ve seen them. They have the same glazed look as people riding subways have when they are hard-wired to their audio devices. Their eyes are open. The lights are on, but there’s nobody home.

The article is really all about the hazards of multi-tasking. It is about people who walk into telephone poles or other pedestrians while absorbed in a phone conversation. Missing from the article was our own local story from last year about the young woman who was killed when she walked into the side of a moving truck. She was crossing the road while talking on her cell phone.

I am saddened most by the apparent public indifference to the problem. Recently, on one of those “streeters” where a TV interviewer asks people on the street about their behaviour, a woman was asked why she was driving and using her cell phone, given that the province had made it illegal, She said that the law was not yet in effect and she’d keep doing it until she was warned. Such mindless indifference. Not only for her own safety, but for the safety of others with whom she shared the road.

One of our local newspapers ran a story last week about how upset the police were over the rise in pedestrian deaths. The blame seems to be going to the car manufacturers who have put so many gadgets in cars that drivers no longer seem to be using their eyes and ears on the road. Like the urban myth about the guy who had cruise control in his van so he connected it and went to the back of the van and letting the car drive itself. It never happened of course, but it is a kind of cautionary tale.

One of my hobbyhorses is that we have become far too dependant on technology and less able to use our own brains to cope. There is a new reality and it is frighteningly unreal.

We are truly cocooning, which means not only do we put ourselves into dangerous territory, but in a larger sense, that too many people are retreating from reality; too many seem only interested in themselves as creatures who have no relationship with thr world around them.

Seeming to contradict this of course is the very visible fact that people do socialize; that most have do have a circle of friends; that most people congregate socially. However, when it comes to the sharing of what we call public space, we are deficient. As long as you are among friends and sharing the same ideas, you behave as a member of a group. But thrust into a larger world, among people you don’t know, your first instinct is to ignore them.

But that’s another blog entirely – the difference between private comfort and public danger.