What cell phones have done to people in public is depressing. Have you noticed how completely people disappear into these small screens, hypnotized, forgetting entirely where they are? Once you start watching for it, you see it everywhere.
What does phone obsession look like?
I was driving in the fast lane behind someone crawling at under thirty in a forty-five zone. Passing on the right, I glanced over and saw the driver mid-argument on her phone, shouting, waving her arms, hands nowhere near the wheel. In a supermarket, a woman treated everyone within earshot to a screaming phone fight with her husband about his affair, continuing at full volume right through the checkout line.
I watched a young man step into the street without looking, so absorbed in his screen that a car missed him by inches, and he had the gall to flip off the driver who nearly killed him.
I stepped into an elevator where all six passengers stared silently into their phones.
In a massage studio lounge, a dozen people who could have relaxed or talked instead fiddled with their screens. Two receptionists at a company I worked for were fired partly for excessive texting. When I joked that the average teenager sends over two thousand texts a month, one told me that was nothing, her last bill showed over ten thousand. She didn’t really have a life in the real world. Communication, for her, happened entirely through a screen.
How dangerous is phone distraction, really?
It goes well past rude. In 2008 a train collision in Chatsworth, California killed twenty-five people and injured more than a hundred. It was first blamed on faulty signals, but the investigation found the engineer had been texting and missed perfectly working signals. That’s an extreme case, but every year thousands are injured or killed because someone was texting or talking behind the wheel.
A Car and Driver test found texting while driving more dangerous than driving drunk, and a Virginia Tech study showed that texting, talking, or even dialing dramatically raises the odds of a crash. People who’d never dream of driving drunk do this every day, and I think the law and the rest of us let them off far too lightly.
Younger people find it hard to believe that almost no one carried a phone until a couple of decades ago. You made a call from a home landline or fished quarters out of your pocket for a payphone.
It’s entirely possible to survive without being connected every hour of every day. It’s healthier to put the phone down, turn it off, and do something that doesn’t involve a tiny screen, and I’ll take that trade every time.
What changed for me
I was as guilty of this as anyone. For years I glued myself to my phone to avoid talking to people or just to fill time at a restaurant. I argued on it in public, I walked into the road staring at it, and yes, I texted and talked while driving, and collected a ticket or two for it.
No more. When I drive, the phone goes in the trunk.
It still connects to the car by Bluetooth so I can take a call if I want, but I can’t be tempted to do anything else with it. My eyes stay on the road, where nothing is more important. I carry a Kindle now, so if I want something to do while waiting or eating, I have millions of books instead of a feed.
In a restaurant, an elevator, anywhere in public, the phone stays in my pocket and I look around and talk to people. Most of them turn out to enjoy a friendly conversation with a stranger. It’s far better than staring at a screen, because the world exists out there, not in a small glowing rectangle in your hand.
