Technology: When distraction is fatal

It was a murder that no one saw coming—because they were too engrossed by their smartphones to notice, said Will Oremus in Slate.com. On a crowded San Francisco train, an apparently deranged man brazenly pulled out a .45-caliber pistol and began pointing it at people. No passenger saw him; a security video showed them all immersed in their screens until the gunman fired a bullet into student Justin Valdez, killing him. “Valdez’s fellow passengers must be asking themselves just what was so absorbing that they couldn’t look up,” said Jonathan Coppage in The American Conservative. Were they on the brink of a new level of Candy Crush? Composing the perfect snarky tweet? Our devices now “exert such a powerful suck on our attention” that we can’t recognize mortal danger, even when it’s right in front of our faces.

Stop scapegoating smartphones, said Lex Berko in Vice.com. So people on public buses and trains use them to zone out, and distract themselves from the noises, smells, and strangers around them. What’s new about that? Would it have been any different if Valdez’s fellow passengers had been engrossed in paperbacks or newspapers? It probably would be wise to pop our heads up from Angry Birds now and then, said Joe Eskenazi in SFWeekly.com. “But left unsaid is just what the hell a train full of vigilant people were supposed to do if they noticed a man waving about a pistol?” At least if you have a phone you can report the crime after it’s happened.

Still, it’s clear that technology is “reprogramming” human behavior on a massive scale, said Leon Neyfakh in The Boston Globe. The San Francisco shooting is one example; another is driving. We’re all aware that resisting the urge to read a text message while operating a 2-ton car is “a matter of life and death.” In fact, 94 percent of Americans say it should be illegal. Yet at least a third of drivers still text and drive, day after day, causing more than 200,000 car crashes a year. Why? Every time our smartphones register the “ping” of an incoming text or other communication, we get a little Pavlovian burst of rewarding endorphins, training us to seek the next one, and the next. We do it while standing in line; we do it at family dinners; we do it when a homicidal maniac is brandishing a gun just a few feet away. The question is: how to stop?

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