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The dangers of SMS and other addictive technologies
I ran across this story today and it really illustrates some things I’ve been thinking about lately:
A 25-year-old driver in Cass County offered a lesson Sunday in what not to do while driving.
When pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy, not only was he traveling at speeds near 80 miles per hour, but he also said he’d drifted into the wrong lane because he was text-messaging, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety said Monday…
I’ve witnessed several dangerous “driving while texting” incidents. Just last month I was driving along side a guy on main street in Heber who was texting while riding his motorcycle at about 30 miles per hour. Yes, I’m serious.
About four years ago I was T-boned in an intersection in Provo by a 21 year old woman who was calling her friend to tell her about the new car she just bought. Yes, that’s right, she had just driven it off the lot and was driving to her insurance agents office when she decided to call her friend with the good news. She didn’t notice her red light or Toyota pickup in the intersection yielding to a left turn. When I saw her coming right for me all I could do it hold on. Fortunately, no one was hurt but her new car was wrecked and my truck had about $4,000 in damage.
If you must talk while driving I recommend going with a blue tooth device. I now have a car with built-in blue tooth that pipes voice in through my speakers. I can also scroll through my Blackberry address book via a scroll wheel on the wheel of my car. My address book displays in the heads up and I call (or end a call) by hitting another button on the wheel. Its so cool - all my Blackberry does is sit in a holder on my center console and take orders from my car. Hands free is SO nice and I believe it is much safer than fumbling around with a phone in your car.
Now, I love to text and I think it can be a great business tool (I use texting all the time to confirm lunch appointments, ask simple questions, etc) but there is definitely a time and a place for these things. We recently put the kibosh down on texting at Church. The youth were texting in Sunday School, which means they weren’t getting much out of the lesson. As you probably have noticed, when people are texting they seem to go into a deeper level of concentration and completely zone out what’s going on around them.
Texting is also taking away some people’s ability to communicate verbally. I would even go as far as to say that I think texting is impeding some youth from learning how to properly communicate verbally. They may get away with it with their high school friends but when they get in the real world and need to talk its going to make life hard on them.
My father-in-law is a doctor. He recently had a teenager in his office with a problem. He was trying to explain several things to her but she wasn’t listening. She was texting her boyfriend. Where was the boyfriend? He was in the room with them!!! My father-in-law finally got ticked off and told her that if she wasn’t going to listen then he wasn’t going to waste his time talking.
While I find that texting makes me more productive - it only makes me productive because I don’t allow it to become a distraction in my life. When I was testing Twitter in 2006 in conjunction with an SMS project I was working on at the time I found the service to be addictive and unproductive for me. Now, I’m not saying that if you use Twitter you are addicted to it and unproductive but my buddy, John Jonas, really hit the nail on the head with a recent post about why he doesn’t use Twitter. I encourage you to check out that post especially if you are self-employed.
You have to ask yourself: how productive are you being when you send out Twitter messages that say something like “sitting in a meeting”? If someone else is following you on Twitter what kind of distraction did you just create for that person when you send out obscure messages over Twitter all day long?
Its just something to think about. Are you endangering others lives by recklessly using distracting technology at an inappropriate time? Are you wasting your employers money because you spend time on the job texting or blogging or IM’ing? How would you feel if you were driving down the road and decided to Twitter something like “heading to Home Depot” just as you nail a kid in a crosswalk?
Is it really that important? Think about it.
dude ur so rong
Left by Jordy on 08/05/2008
Left by Chris Knudsen on 08/05/2008I’m surprised more people haven’t lost their jobs over Twitter. I’ve read things like “trying to get through this lame meeting,” or “Why are CEOs so stupid when it comes to doing press interviews”
these are rough examples, but close to what I remember… Another guy today admitted to using a proxy server to access a website that was blocked by the company firewall.
Left by Russ on 08/11/2008