I always find it annoying watching someone swirve on the road only to find them texting on their cell phone as I pass by, my fist waving angrily out the window. This whole texting revolution has gone too far in my mind. The number of car accidents in the UK alone attributed to texting on a cell phone is uncanny. The fact that London is installing foam around some of it’s metropolitain street posts due to people walking into them as their heads are down, concentrating on their lovers text message request for a couple of limes from the local supermarket, is in itself absurd. However, last weekend a friend of mine told me about something he had seen online that blew his mind (mind you he was texting, eating McDonalds, smoking and driving the car at the same time/watching a movie). I wont describe it as the video is worth a thousand words in itself … you have to check it. See below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U49ZREmbZM]
What are we becoming?
Frankly, I think the ubiquity of texting is crazy. While the biker in the video is extreme, on more than one occasion I’ve been driving in a standard car with someone who proceeds to whip out their blackberry and reply to a message. While physically impressive, this scares the crap out of me every time. Not surprisingly, these people get into freqent fender-benders, and thank god not worse.
I think that the ability of the internet to rapidly disseminate information has led to this issue. If any data point is at our finger tips within seconds, and if global communication is seamless and instantaneous, people who don’t respond right away are at risk of being left behind.
If you’re at work and the boss sends out a question I have a smart answer to, it’s meaningless if the guy at the next desk beats myou to the punch. More importantly, if you’re in school and a pretty girl asks for help studying, you’re really be kicked yourself if you don’t respond in time and she ends up at the library with some other jerk.
For these reasons, I suspect that “extreme texting” will become even more prevalent.