Those irritating cell phones
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2000-04-08
Every new technology introduced into a society causes problems, or perhaps it is better to say that it has effects that inflict change on our everyday relationships and create friction. It takes time to adapt and develop the appropriate ethics to go with them. The cellular phone is no exception and, since so many people are using them now, they are a major source of concern. The lack of good manners is often very annoying.
Sometimes the annoyance is well founded, as when a wireless phone rings during a movie. Sometimes it's much more deeply rooted. We're annoyed but we don't know why. Some time ago, a contributor to an Internet discussion group complained about a woman he saw in the supermarket discussing her purchases with her husband over a cell phone. While talking with a companion in a supermarket is common enough, apparently the use of a cell phone raised the ire of this shopper. It was unnecessary and "sad," he complained.
That incident occurred in the last century (1999), just a matter of months ago at the time this article is being written but a long time in this era of rapid technological change. Whatever indefinable social boundary the woman in the supermarket crossed, at least in the mind of the complainant, there's no doubt that similar boundaries and perceptions are at the base of many of the complaints about cell phone use by drivers. As U.K. driver trainer Susan Millar pointed out in another internet discussion, "As a driving instructor I must consider the use of hand-held mobiles while driving to be unsafe. However, I do think that smoking is much worse, but no one seems to make a fuss about that."
Certainly, cell phones can distract drivers , and used carelessly they can be dangerous, but anecdotal evidence is a rather unreliable way to assess their effects. Researchers are having difficulty with the task of pinning down the statistics on incidences in which cell phones contribute to crashes. Nevertheless, the crash rate seems to be rising and governments are concerned. A growing list of countries are passing legislation against cell phone use while driving, and particularly against hand-held phones.
And that brings us back to the topic of cell phone manners and behavior. There are many distractions for drivers, and many more on the way as in-car information technologies such as fax machines, Internet screens, navigation systems, and "heads-up" windshield displays become widespread. Legislating against all these distractions could be a nightmare, and almost impossible to enforce effectively. That means that drivers will have to learn to allocate their attention more effectively.
One of the strongest points used by legislators in pushing through laws against cell phones is that the phone is a different kind of distraction. It's more demanding. Distractions such as navigation systems, the radio, passengers chatting, can be managed by the driver. And, as researchers Donald Redelmeier and Robert Tibshirani point out, passengers are aware of what's going on around the car and can pause in their conversation at critical moments. The car phone, on the other hand, can ring at any time, and there may be a sense of importance or urgency in a phone call that drastically disturbs the driver's ability to attend to matters in traffic.
The intrusiveness of phones is not new. It's been a bone of social contention ever since phones became popular in the early part of the last century. One example is the frustration felt by customers waiting by the counter as shop attendants suddenly shift their attention to a phone customer. The difference with cell phones is that they can cut in anywhere, and even at the most inopportune times, unless the wireless phone owner takes charge and controls the distraction.
Seeing another driver hold a wireless phone to his or her ear may be annoying to other road users and it's quite likely that we become more critical of a driver who is doing this, picking out faults that we would normally not see or ignore. However, hands-free phones may not be a solution either. Kazuko Okamura, a researcher at Japan's National Research Institute of Police Science, reports that when legislation against the use of hand-help cell phones while driving came into force in that country in November, 1999, there was a sudden surge in sales of cheap ear phones. But Redelmeier and Tibshirani concluded from their studies that it is not the dexterity required to use a hand-held cell phone that causes the crash-risk problem but the driver's ability to allocate attention.
This is supported by research in England indicating little or no difference in crash risk between use of hand-held and hands-free cell phones while driving.
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