December 06, 2006: The Digital Highway just got more Hazardous!

Last month it was motorists wearing iPod ear buds while driving. In the American tradition of one-upmanship, we now have a CNET report of a motorist in Washington tapping into his BlackBerry while driving on Interstate 5 (presumably at Interstate speeds). Paying more attention to the BlackBerry, this motorist failed to notice that the traffic in front of him had stopped. Caroline McCarthy delivered the punch line for CNET News.com as follows:

The result was a five-vehicle crunch that included a 28-passenger Community Transit bus and a car that was carrying a woman and her 5-month-old son.

As of this writing, seven indignant comments have already come in for Ms. McCarthy's report; but one has to wonder how many of those indignant writers are fully focused on driving when they are behind the wheel!

November 21, 2006 (2): The Hazardous Digital Highway

Today's E-Commerce Times includes an article by Christine Laue of the Omaha World-Herald explaining that iPods are becoming as big a road hazard as cell phones due to the increasing number of motorists wearing ear buds. Maybe it is time for us to take stock of what is really going on, whether it is on the sidewalks or the highways. What cell phones and music players have in common is how convenient they make it for their users to detach from reality (and, given its connotation in the drug world, the noun "user" seems more appropriate than ever). This, of course, goes hand-in-glove with the related attraction (addiction?) to virtual social environments, such as Second Life. Where this all points is to a "community" of individuals who cannot take their reality any more, whether it is too much traffic, pedestrians trying to cross the street where they want to make a turn, or just too many people in any setting. We have now provided these individuals with a means to "turn off" reality, just as Chance (with his television addiction) tried to do in Being There (a subtly ironic title for anyone who has read Heidegger). People who drive under such an "influence" are as dangerous (if not more so) than those who drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Do we have to wait for another incarnation of MADD before anyone does anything about this; and, if we go after the "dealers" where drugs are involved, should we not consider doing the same with these technologies?