Gibbs ponder our obsession with our digital electronics.
It seems that pretty much all of us are obsessed by our portable technology to what can only described as an epic degree and this has interesting and serious consequences.
Some of this obsession may simply be due to the “Oh, shiny!” effect, otherwise known as “Squirrel!” (if you haven’t seen the movie “Up” that won’t make much sense). But while the novelty of these digital things that popular culture deems “cool” (iPad? “Oh! Shiny squirrel!”) is significant, I believe our obsession with our digital devices is driven by the desire to be distracted from real life; to be in our own little world.
When you’re texting on your iPhone, exchanging email on your Blackberry, or listening to music on your iPod, you create your own little bubble of reality, your own universe of control in which you are in charge and you can ignore all the distractions and chaos of the rest of the world.
ANALYSIS: Is wireless making us nuts?
You see people engaged in this kind of digital distraction everywhere. How many people walking, jogging, or cycling down the street are plugged into some kind of digital music device? How many are talking on a cellphone or texting?
As you next drive to or from work, look at the driver in the car next to you at the stoplights. The chances are pretty high they will have a cellphone stuck to their head despite whatever laws your state might have against such behavior.
RECENT CASE: Driver using 2 cellphones gets 12-month driving ban
Anyway, I offer as evidence of our headlong, insatiable drive to be completely and utterly distracted from the rest of the world that we are, literally, distracting ourselves to death.
Consider the following statistic: Pedestrian deaths for the first half of 2010 in the U.S. rose for the first time in four years according to the United States’ Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). This was despite overall traffic fatalities being significantly down along with four years of steady decline in pedestrian deaths.
The culprit? Vernon F. Betkey Jr., the GHSA chairman, claimed, “One factor may be the increased distractions for both pedestrians and drivers. Anyone who travels in a busy city has seen countless pedestrians engrossed in conversation or listening to music while crossing a busy street. Just as drivers need to focus on driving safely, pedestrians need to focus on walking safely — without distractions.”
Now Mr. Betkey may have gone a little far afield blaming talking in general as a distraction, but the listening to music thing … ah, there’s a good point.
According to a paper titled “Distraction and pedestrian safety: How talking on the phone, texting, and listening to music impact crossing the street,” from the Department of Psychology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, if you’re talking on the phone while crossing the street you are twice as likely to be hit as people without any such distractions.
But music is as nothing compared to texting. Should you be typing an “OMG” or a “w00t!” or even a “LMAO” while negotiating the mean streets, then you are four times more likely to wind up pushing up the daisies!
ANOTHER CASE: Texting while walking, woman falls in mall fountain, then …
This made me wonder whether listening to music while you work at your desk is risky. I’m sitting here listening to a Deep House Cat podcast (“Episode 105.0 – Muge & Tiny Toon Guest Mix” which is outstanding!) while I wrote this … er, write this.
See, that brain blart was probably due to the fact that I have the bass up to biblical levels. Do I care? No! I’m in my own little world!
So, I wonder: While I, and my esteemed editor, will proofread this column [ed note: improve it] and the end result will be polished and fit for consumption by your good selves despite my digital distractions, can the same be said for software?
How much enterprise software has been developed under the pervasive influence of truly dirty dubstep or hardcore techno? When programmers are programming does their choice in music and their distraction come out in the code? And given the sheer monumental complexity of what they create, does any amount of code review and testing really overcome the collision between their distracted brains and the code they work on?
Imagine that code out in the real world … running factories, controlling huge powerful machines … does the programmer’s distraction produce better code or worse code?
It’s hard to know, but one thing is certain, if the programmers insist on texting on their iPhones or grooving to their iPod while they commute, their code may never get finished.
As for “Jennifer Aniston naked,” I was kidding. It was a distraction.
Gibbs grooves in Ventura, Calif. Your distraction to backspin@gibbs.com.
