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Cell-phone use while driving is a brain problem, not a hands problem. Even with hands-free use, phones suck your brain out of the physical world, fatally distracting you from the road. Second, the effect is as bad as driving drunk. Hands-free phone use can impair driving skills more than intoxication does.
We prohibit driving under the influence of alcohol. We should prohibit driving under the influence of cell phones, too. But giving up our phones is hard. How can we do it? How can we maintain what cell phones offer—mobile access—without endangering others?
More here.
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If you've ever seen a TV cop show, you know you're entitled to one phone call after you're busted. But that was before you could get unlimited, unmonitored calls from a cell phone chucked over a prison fence. Want to call your lawyer? The employees in your still-thriving drug business? A hit man to take out that witness who's scheduled to testify against you? The getaway driver you've hired to complete your escape? Thanks to prepaid, concealable, untraceable mobile communication devices, it's no problem.
Check out the latest numbers. Cell phones confiscated in federal prisons last year: more than 1,600. In Mississippi state prisons: more than 1,800. In California: more than 2,800.
Yesterday the Senate held a hearing to debate what to do about this. The bill on the table would authorize jamming of cell-phone signals in prisons. The wireless carriers' association, CTIA, showed up to testify against it. You can find good writeups and overviews from Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica, Ryan Singer at Wired's Epicenter, and Chloe Albanesius at PC Magazine.
The industry's argument is that jamming could disrupt legitimate cell-phone use, including cops and firefighters, whereas more sophisticated methods would nail just the bad guys. I'm skeptical of the first argument but interested in the second. Cell phones in prison, like IEDs in war and submersibles in drug-running, are part of a technology arms race. You can't win such races with sheer force, killing civilians or causing other collateral damage. You need precision.
Steve Largent, CTIA's president, proposed two alternatives to jamming. First,
With cell detection systems, prison administrators and correctional officers can detect, locate, and confiscate unauthorized wireless devices found in a correctional environment. Confiscated wireless devices can provider correctional authorities and law enforcement with call records, address information, and even photographs that can assist in disciplinary actions and criminal prosecutions. Alternatively, once illicit devices have been detected, prison officials and law enforcement may decide to leave them in place and arrange to monitor them in accordance with the wiretap statutes.
Second,
another promising technological solution to this problem involves the use of managed access. This approach enables a corrections facility to manage wireless access in a controlled area, such as a prison. Managed access would restrict communications on the commercial wireless networks to only a subset of allowed users (also known as a "white-list"). Other users are blocked from the commercial system access in the area.
I like both ideas. But are they ready to deploy? Largent told the committee:
Just last week, CTIA convened a day-long meeting involving North American vendors of cell detection and managed access solutions and engineers from a number of CTIA's carrier members to discuss potential solutions to this issue. We hope our efforts will put the industry in a position to trial alternative solutions in partnership with various states ...
Good for you, CTIA. But I don't believe for a minute that you'd be working hard on these alternatives if you weren't facing the threat of federally authorized jamming. And this is one reason why I'm not a pure libertarian. Can technology help the good guys stay ahead in the cell-phone arms race? Yes. Is industry better than government at coming up with creative, pinpoint solutions? Yes. Will industry do this without the threat of clumsy, burdensome government intervention? No.
So thank you, senators, for applying the heat. And don't forget the same lesson as you're legislating health care reform. Government-run alternatives don't always have to outperform private industry. They just have to scare it.
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In outer space, when an object becomes so powerful that it sucks everything nearby into itself, we call it a black hole.
In cyberspace, when a device becomes so powerful that it sucks every electronic function into itself, we call it a BlackBerry.
Over the last couple of years, we've witnessed the consolidation of more and more functions into what used to be called a cell phone. First it was a phone, then a texting device, then a camera, then a game console, then a Web surfer, then a music player. Then it became a reader of physical hyperlinks. Then a reader of 3-D digital maps. Then a universal remote. Today, we call this thing a smartphone. Within three years, we'll be calling it something else. As it absorbs one function after another, it's becoming strong enough to consume the ultimate prey: the minds of its users.
Here's one more job the phone is devouring: GPS.
Jenna Wortham presents the latest trend data in the New York Times:
More than 40 percent of all smartphone owners use their mobile devices to get turn-by-turn directions, according to data from Compete, a Web analytics firm. For iPhone users, the figure is even higher, eclipsing 80 percent. ... Sales of traditional GPS units from companies like TomTom, Garmin and Magellan (a unit of MiTAC International) have fallen sharply recently. During the first quarter, TomTom said it shipped 29 percent fewer GPS units compared with the period in 2008. Garmin said unit sales fell 13 percent in the first quarter compared with the previous year. ... Meanwhile, shipments of smartphones in North America are expected to grow by 25 percent this year, with more than 80 percent of them equipped with GPS, according to ABI Research.
One reason for the exodus from dedicated GPS devices is cost: You can get a smartphone for $100 to $300 instead of spending $177 on a GPS unit. But the main reason is consolidation: Nobody wants to carry two devices—or three, or four, or five—when you can carry one that does all five things.
Some GPS makers, Wortham reports, are responding to this trend by selling GPS as software for smartphones instead of selling it as hardware. Others are adding phone service to their GPS devices. Good luck with that. But the bottom line is that no matter how this fight ends—smartphones with GPS, GPS with smartphones, or add-on GPS software for your smartphone—only one device will remain. Consolidation is inexorable.
What will the smartphone eat next? In no particular order, my money's on credit cards, car keys, flashlights, flash drives, books, television sets, and laptops. Some of these functions are already being absorbed. And one of these days, somebody will figure out how to add a stun gun. Just try not to hit the wrong button.
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Is it rude to focus on your smartphone during meetings?
It's way more than that. It's another sign that the virtual world is overtaking the physical world.
Here are the evolving facts on the ground, so to speak, as presented by Alex Williams in Monday's New York Times:
The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds—and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.
Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors. A few years ago, only "the investment banker types" would use BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment systems. "Now it's everybody." He said that if he spotted 6 of 10 colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.
It is routine for Washington officials to bow heads silently around a conference table—not praying—while others are speaking, said Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although BlackBerrys are banned in certain areas of the State Department headquarters for security reasons, their use is epidemic where they are allowed. "You'll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting," Mr. Reines said.
The Times headlined this article, "At Meetings, It's Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners." But the story is much bigger than manners. It's the ascent of the virtual world as a rival to the physical world. We've talked about this trend before in the context of cell phones and driving. When phone calls draw your eyes off the road, and when electronic messages pull your attention out of business meetings, it's time to think about what's happening to the relationship between your mind and your body. You're drifting out of physical space. Not just you but the millions of others who are doing the same thing.
That point about "the etiquette debate ... tilting in the favor of smartphone use"? That's the virtual world gaining parity and vying for supremacy. That guy who speeds up his presentation when most of his listeners disappear into their BlackBerrys? That's the physical world struggling to keep up. That observation from Clinton's adviser about "half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting"? That's no joke. They really are having a meeting. It just happens to be in the virtual world. If your body is in the room but your brain is offline, you're missing that meeting. You're absent.
The virtual world has many advantages in the fight for your attention. It can connect you to people and places far away. It can tell you almost instantly what you need to know. It lets you flip through incoming messages at your own pace, unlike the boring presentation you're enduring in the physical world. And it lets you communicate privately, even in public. That's what many of those "submeetings" are, an executive tells Williams. They're exchanges of "things that you might not say out loud."
There's the real story: People are migrating from the old world to the new one. That's why you're here, reading and exchanging ideas with people you've never met offline. "Manners" is just the old world's way of protesting this migration. But protestation is weak. The old world has no inherent claim to your attention. It will have to earn it.
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Should possession of a switched-on cell phone while driving be illegal?
A trolley crash in Boston on Friday night is raising that question. First there was last year's train crash near Los Angeles, with 25 dead and 130 injured. In three hours of work before the crash, the engineer received 28 text messages and sent 29 more. He sent his last message 22 seconds before impact, just after passing a signal that would have alerted him to the disaster ahead.
Now comes the Boston crash, in which one trolley went through a red light and rear-ended another. Forty-nine people were injured—none of them gravely, but "more than a few were bloodied," according to the Globe. Officials say the operator of the second trolley "was text-messaging his girlfriend" and "was looking down at his phone and could not apply the brakes quickly enough when he looked up and saw the trolley in front of him."
If texting can cause crashes on train tracks, which prevent lateral drift, think how much more dangerous it is to text while driving a car. Only 10 states outlaw this practice, but I suspect that's largely a matter of legislators being slow to catch up with evolving technology. You can't drive while looking down and typing a message.
How about holding a phone and talking instead of typing? That way, your eyes can stay on the road. But your hand is still occupied with the phone, and you might be distracted by punching in somebody's number. Hence the push in many states to restrict cell-phone use to hands-free operation.
Still, that leaves your brain occupied by the phone conversation. And this arrangement isn't safe, either. That's why the National Safety Council wants a nationwide ban on using, not just holding, your phone while driving.
Boston's transit authority already forbids cell phone use by train and trolley operators. (Such phones aren't needed for job-related communication, since the trains have radios and emergency call buttons.) But it has let them carry their phones, and over the last three years, some four dozen train operators and bus drivers have been cited for using their phones on the job. The carry-but-don't-use policy hasn't worked.
On the heels of Friday's crash, the transit authority has announced the next logical step. It will "ban on-the-job possession of cell phones" by train operators and "fire anyone caught carrying a phone, pager, or similar device," the Globe reports. The authority's general manager puts it this way:
Leave it at home. Leave it in your car. Leave it with a friend. Leave it in a locker. But you are not to get on board that bus or [train or trolley] and have a cell phone on your person or in the cab. Period. This is going to be a zero-tolerance policy.
Massachusetts' transportation secretary thinks other states will adopt the same policy for transit operators. I bet he's right. States can justify and enforce such a policy because transit operators are on the clock working for the government.
Could they enforce a similar policy against you while you're driving your car? A law against having a cell phone in the seat next to you? I doubt it. But the logical progression is worth thinking about. First, ban texting at the wheel, because driving requires your eyes. Second, ban holding a phone, because driving requires your hands. Third, ban talking on a phone, because driving requires your brain. And fourth, if everybody's violating the ban on phone use and accidents are killing people as a result, then do what we do with alcohol: Adopt the equivalent of an open-container law for cell phones.
Open-container laws, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "prohibit the possession of any open alcoholic beverage container ... in the passenger area of any motor vehicle that is located on a public highway or right-of-way." The equivalent in this case would be a powered-up cell phone. If phone use while driving really is as dangerous as being drunk at the wheel—which is what preliminary evidence suggests—would you oppose such a law?
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Two days ago, we were talking about how the physical and digital worlds are beginning to converge and blur.
Step 1: physical hyperlinks.
Step 2: the integration of physical perception with 3-D digital maps.
Step 3? I speculated that it might be a change in human perception through external devices, biotechnology, or acculturation. But maybe that's Step 4. Maybe Step 3 is the convergence of the phone with the universal remote.
There's nothing mind-blowing about this idea. But that's the point. In real life, cosmic revolutions unfold incrementally: a device here, a software upgrade there. The New York Times lays out some of the new options:
1. A free application (called Remote) and a gizmo (called Intelliphone) that enable iPhones to control computers.
2. A $100 hardware-software package (called Shadow) that "converts a BlackBerry's Bluetooth transmission into an infrared signal your TV can understand." A similar device lets the BlackBerry control a garage door.
3. A $10 app (called i-Clickr) that uses the iPhone screen to display buttons that will operate a PowerPoint presentation on a nearby PC.
The Times says this is "probably the beginning of the end" for the universal remote, since it relies on buttons, whereas a smartphone screen can provide as many options as you need. But my guess is that a more fundamental dynamic is at work: We want to centralize our power to manipulate the things around us. The universal remote was supposed to do that. But it doesn't, because it can't navigate the digital world the way the smartphone can.
We need to consolidate these two devices. And it's a lot easier to put the remote's abilities in the smartphone than vice versa.
Bye-bye, universal remote. You can't be universal when you don't reach the other universe.
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How do alternate universes materialize, coexist, and converge? Here's one answer: Look at your cell phone.
Two years ago, I saw an article in the New York Times about "physical hyperlinks." Essentially, these are contact nodes between the physical and digital worlds. I can hardly begin to explain them. So I'll let the Times' Louise Story do the talking:
New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows [cell] phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet. In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen. ...
In Japan, McDonald's customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards. ...
"You've picked up this product, and you don't want to go back to your PC," said Tim Kindberg, a senior researcher at the Bristol, England, lab of Hewlett-Packard. "Or you're outside this building, and you want more information. We call it the ‘physical hyperlink.' "
In much the same way that Web publishing took off because of the ability to link to other people's sites, cellphone technologies linking everyday objects with the Web would reveal the digitally encoded attributes of tangible things on grocery shelves or newsstands.
In this rendering of the nexus between space and cyberspace, the cell phone is the reader. It translates physical objects into their digital incarnations. The operative digital incarnation, as of 2007, was bar codes:
The most promising way to link cellphones with physical objects is a new generation of bar codes: square-shaped mosaics of black and white boxes that can hold much more information than traditional bar codes. The cameras on cellphones scan the codes, and then the codes are translated into videos, music or text on the phone screens. ... Now, as more cellphones come equipped with cameras and the ability to run small computer programs, the codes are beginning to appear on some state drivers' licenses and on some mailing labels ... In Japan, some highway billboards have codes large enough for passing motorists to read them with their phones. Hospitals put them on prescriptions, allowing pharmacies to instantly scan the medical information rather than read it.
So, in a way: cell phone + bar code = wormhole.
That was two years ago. I've been waiting for the next piece of the puzzle. I think this is it: the integration of physical perception with three-dimensional digital maps. Here's the Times' John Markoff:
Digital map displays on hand-held phones can now show the nearest gas station or A.T.M., reviews of nearby restaurants posted online by diners, or the location of friends. ... Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now "augment" reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user's surroundings produced by the phone's camera. With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one's surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world. ...
Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, [asks], "How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you're looking at in the physical world?"
Increasingly, phones will allow users to look at an image of what is around them. You could be surrounded by skyscrapers but have an immediate reference map showing your destination and features of the landscape, along with your progress in real time.
If I understand this transition correctly, we're no longer talking about two worlds, one physical and one digital, connected at selectively engineered nodes. We're now talking about a wholesale overlap between the two worlds. Every physical object, or at least every object of sufficient size to be mapped, will have a digital incarnation. And you'll be able to alternate smoothly between the two worlds, most conspicuously by using your 3-D digital map to see right through a visual obstruction.
This is how cosmic revolutions unfold in real life: not abruptly or mysteriously, as in science fiction, but incrementally. A device here, a software upgrade there, a synchronization, a multiplication. New technologies, new possibilities, new combinations, new habits. Economics and culture are as crucial to this process as technical innovation.
The next piece of the puzzle may not be a change in either of the two worlds. It may be a change in what is, for now, the ultimate reader: the human being. This could take place through externally worn devices, biotechnology, or acculturation. But one way or another, we'll begin to shift our mental attention and our comfort zone from the physical to the digitally enhanced environment. If you want to see what this kind of mental migration looks like, just glance at all the people around you who are talking on cell phones, lost in invisible worlds, oblivious to their surroundings.
If we're lucky, the next migration will bring our minds back into alignment with our bodies. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. In a gesture as simple as holding up your smartphone to see what's around you, we'll begin to inhabit the new world, without leaving the old one.
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What's dumber than driving while talking on a cell phone? Driving while talking on a cell phone and breast-feeding a baby.
Genine Compton of Kettering, Ohio, come on down! You're the next contestant on "I used my child as a human air bag."
According to local police, Ms. Compton admitted to this feat of triple-tasking on Thursday. Here's the Dayton Daily News transcript of a fellow driver's call to the authorities:
I tried to say something to her. She literally has the little girl on the steering wheel and I said, "I can't believe you have that kid in your lap," and she said, "You want to pop your titty out and breastfeed this kid?" That's what she said to me. I'm like, "You can feed your kid when you stop." It's like wet out here. It's full of traffic. It's ridiculous. She's got like three other kids in the car.
Compton's defense? According to the police, she said "she does not deprive her child when the child is hungry."
Apparently, in our high-pressure, gadget-driven world, people have become so accustomed to multitasking that they've stopped noticing it as an elective option. No one's asking you to deprive your child. If she's hungry, by all means, feed her. And if you need to take a call while you're at it, go ahead. Just don't drive while you're doing either of these things. Is that so hard to understand?
It seems that we now think of driving as a background activity. Whatever comes up in the foreground—phone call, text message, hungry baby—gets dealt with as though it's the first thing demanding our attention. Like a projectile following a straight line in empty space, we feel at rest in motion. But we aren't projectiles, we don't follow straight lines, and the space around us isn't empty. In traffic, inertia kills.
And that doesn't just go for the lady breast-feeding at the wheel. It goes for the child-safety enthusiast who reports her. Nobody seems to have flagged this bit from the Daily News story:
"I'm following right behind her right now on Far Hills Avenue," the caller said as he spoke to a Kettering dispatcher in a recording of his non-emergency call that was released by police. ...
You're following right behind her? While talking on your phone? So you can report her for multitasking at the wheel? Hello?
If you see somebody driving while distracted, feel free to report the culprit. But first, practice what you preach: Pull over.
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What's worse than an 11th-century theocracy running a 21st-century country? A theocracy that enforces its edicts with the help of 21st-century technology.
The country is Iran; the religion is fundamentalist Islam; the technology is cell phone cameras. The report comes from an Iranian newspaper, Vatan-e-Emrooz, via the Associated Press:
The first mixed soccer game—females vs. males—since the 1979 Islamic revolution led to swift punishment Monday, as an Iranian soccer club said it had suspended three officials involved and handed out fines of up to $5,000. Iran's strict Islamic rules ban any physical contact between unrelated men and women, and Iranian women are even banned from attending soccer games when male teams play. ... [The club] said its disciplinary committee suspended two officials for a year while a third was suspended for six months.
How were the women's libbers behind this outrage caught? Allah be praised, by modern handheld electronics.
The officials—a coach and two managers—first denied the game took place, but video clips on cell phones of the game were used as evidence against them, the daily newspaper reported.
For much of the past century, there's been a running debate over whether economic liberalization leads to political liberalization. Then the globalization and democratization of communications technology were supposed to help. Last year, President Bush authorized exports of cell phones to Cuba, thinking this would loosen the regime's grip. "If the Cuban people can be trusted with mobile phones, they should be trusted to speak freely in public," he argued.
It's a nice thought. But as the Iranian case illustrates, democratized technology can be used just as easily to enforce tyranny as to challenge it. Devices won't point us in the right direction. We'll have to be the ones who point them.
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Hey, cell-phone zombie! Wake up! The National Safety Council is trying to pull you over.
The council, a congressionally chartered nonprofit that helped lead the fight for seat-belt use, wants a nationwide ban on cell-phone use while driving. Not just a ban on holding your phone. A ban on using it.
It's about time. Three months ago, Human Nature looked up the research on cell-phone use at the wheel. It's brutal. Even with a hands-free device, talking on a phone can impair driving skills more than intoxication does. Brain scans show the phone conversation sucking the driver's mind from one world into another.
Just last week, a lawsuit in the "texting-engineer" train crash near Los Angeles alleged that the engineer's bosses knew about his texting habit but ignored it. This weekend, I was complaining that the company should have taken driving while texting as seriously as we take driving while drunk.
My complaint has been answered. On Monday, the NSC agreed. Council president Janet Froetscher cited the same flaw in hands-free cell-phone laws: "Even if both hands are on the wheel, your head is in the call, and not on your driving." And she drew the same comparison to alcohol: "When our friends have been drinking, we take the car keys away. It's time to take the cell phone away."
Can a total ban get through the legislative process, politically? It'll be hard, precisely because, as Froetscher notes, 270 million Americans use cell phones, and 80 percent of them use their phones while driving. But the council has succeeded before, and it will do so again, if it can persuade lawmakers and the public to see cell phones in cars the way we now see liquor. "We have been through this before with seatbelts, with drunk driving," says Froetscher. "We do research. When the research demonstrates that something is very dangerous and we can save lives, we educate the public about it."
The insurance industry agrees that a total cell-phone driving ban "makes sense based on the research." The council has also identified a proven mechanism for nationalizing such a ban: Congress can use its highway-construction legislation to financially reward states that pass no-cell laws. And 16 states have set a potentially useful precedent by banning cell-phone use among drivers with learner's permits, intermediate licenses, or both.
To me, the persuasive analogy is alcohol. Intuitively, cell phones in the car seem more justified and less objectionable than booze does, because booze is stupefying, whereas phones are engaging. But the more the phone engages you in its own world, the more it stupefies you in the one you're navigating. Nobody's saying you can't use your phone or your car. Just not at the same time.
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Remember that train crash near L.A. in September, where the engineer was texting while driving? Twenty-five dead, 130 injured. In three hours of work before the crash, the engineer received 28 text messages and sent 29 more. He sent his last message 22 seconds before impact, just after passing a signal that would have alerted him to the disaster ahead.
Now some of the victims have filed suit. They're alleging that the engineer's bosses were warned about his texting habit. Here's the New York Times summary:
The plaintiffs' lawyers said at a news conference that a co-worker of Mr. Sanchez [the engineer] had told managers ... that Mr. Sanchez frequently used his cellphone while on duty, in defiance of company policy. ... The employee placed at least two calls to managers from July to September, [the plaintiffs' attorney] said. In addition, he said, the employee told him that on a routine inspection two months before the crash, a supervisor caught Mr. Sanchez violating the policy barring engineers' use of cellphones while on duty. Still, he said, the engineer was never punished.
Remember, these are just allegations. They'll have to be tested at trial, if it comes to that. But if they're borne out, let's not make the same mistake Sanchez's superiors allegedly made. Let's take driving while texting—or while phoning—as seriously as we take driving while drunk. After all, as this column mentioned three months ago, research shows that even with a hands-free device, talking on a phone can impair driving skills more than intoxication does.
Alcohol has been around for millennia. Cell phones have not. We evolved to function in the natural world, one setting at a time. Nature has never tested a species's ability to function in two worlds at once. We're now taking that test, and we're flunking it. So here's a message to the 45 states that let people drive while holding a phone, and to the 50 states that let allow driving while talking on a hands-free phone: Sober up.