Distracted and Deadly

As far as my observation of modern life goes, the ubiquity of smartphone and tablet device usage has gone beyond rudeness and has become downright deadly for the user.  People have become so absorbed in what their devices provide for them that they become oblivious to their immediate surroundings.  The recent deaths of several people in the San Francisco bay area bears this out.

A couple of weeks ago a man got on a muni bus, silently brandished a .45 caliber handgun, put it back into his pocket and took it out several more times (this was caught on a video surveillance camera on the bus) and then with over a dozen fellow passengers within just a few feet of him, who did not notice what was going on, pulled the trigger and shot a man in the back, killing him. 

As bad as this was, the collective inattention to what was going on that might have prevented this, is, for me, at least as troubling. 

A year or so before this incident a 23-year old woman in San Francisco was killed when she stepped into a crosswalk, totally engrossed in her cellphone and was struck by a bus.  She didn’t even look up or see the bus coming and gave the driver no chance to try to avoid hitting her.  This is not an isolated incident. 

Less lethal than these examples, but representative of the problem,  is the increase in crime that involves these devices.  Smartphone and other personal electronic devices have become the number one target for thefts in public places.  San Francisco police chief Greg Suhr says that 2 out of 3 robberies in the city now involve smartphones.  “[These things] make people incredibly vulnerable to crime.  And the inattention, which creates this tremendous vulnerability to people, is just something that’s so easily corrected.” Pickpockets in Europe are having a heyday. 

Even in public places everyone is somewhere else. But it affects those who are nearby who are not, at the time, ‘digitally connected.’ And this is the larger point that I am making today. 

As calloused as it may seem as I write this, I feel more concern for the others nearby—those who have to clean up the mess, those who will not forget what they have witnessed, those whose lives are impacted by the ripple effect of the heedless or careless or inconsiderate people who precipitated the incident(s) in the first place.  

Whether street drag racers of fifty years ago, public place smokers of thirty or forty years ago, gang-bangers, or driving texters or cell phone users today, the result is the same: someone else will probably have to share in paying the price of thoughtless behavior.   And how about the super obese or drug addicts or alcoholics who subject health-services personnel and providers , and families, and the general  public untold problems for the costs of caring for these people?  

  

Well, I think my views on the subject are pretty transparent.  As I used to tell may children when they were young:  ‘Lets not be part of the problem.’