Every night, like clockwork, I’m roused from my J 202-induced stupor by an eruption of honking and angry shouting from the street outside my apartment. I used to run and look every time in case someone had been hit by a car (I don’t have a television so my entertainment options are limited, you see), but by now I’ve come to understand the source of the commotion: Someone, most likely a student, has walked into the street without bothering to see if any traffic is coming and very nearly reenacted a scene from Grand Theft Auto IV.
We college students are sort of lost in our own world. I conducted a little research (something I promised myself I’d never do when I first took this job) and found that of the 20 bicyclists I asked, 40 percent had hit or nearly hit an oblivious pedestrian who stepped out in front of them without checking first to see if it was safe. Sure, the sample size is small, but we’ve all seen at least one near-disaster caused by a walking student’s lack of awareness. This is no rare or isolated issue.
What’s going on? Where do our minds go when we’re on the way to and from class? The same students who can hold an intelligent dialogue about Plato’s call for a philosopher king can leave class and five minutes later nearly blunder their way into the front end of a bike.
The immediate culprit, of course, is technology. I’m always amazed by the people I see walking, texting, and listening to iPods at the same time when I can barely take a sip of Diet Coke unless I’m standing dead still. We’re a high tech generation and we so often surround ourselves with Dave Matthews in our ears, phones in our hands and potential emoticons in our minds that we lose track of what’s going on in the world around us, as the absentminded pedestrians in the street outside my apartment prove night after night.
This problem is bigger than any one college campus. Last July, the American College of Emergency Physicians issued an alert warning that texting while walking can – and has – led to serious injury and, in two cases, death. A dozen or so states have drafted legislation to outlaw texting while driving; in 2006 nearly 30 children were injured when a school bus in Pennsylvania crashed on the Interstate because the driver was fiddling with his phone. This, you understand, is how the robotic uprising will begin: First they’ll distract us with pretty music and LED displays until we all get run over, and then they’ll break out the robo-velociraptors to finish off whoever is left.
You may think I’m crazy, but consider that for years the principal distractions for our generation had been iPods and cell phones, up until the powers that be revealed the logical combination of the two: the iPhone. The machines are evolving. They’re getting stronger and more adept at finding ways to remove us from the physical world.
But it’s not just an issue of spatial awareness that’s the problem: The gadget obsession is making us oblivious to the world’s news and events, too.
Despite an abundance of radios, televisions, computers and multiple free newspapers advocating multiple points of view, much of the world’s daily goings-on seem to be slipping by the majority of today’s college students. Why else would professors quiz students about current events? Sure, the drama of the election permeated our lives, but that probably wouldn’t have been the case had one of the candidates not been a media celebrity who made extensive use of the Internet and had his own Facebook page.
How many times have you seen campus activists on the sidewalk for an organization such as Greenpeace or Planned Parenthood, and turned up your music or talked on your phone and pretended not to notice them? We’re using these tools to block out issues that often directly affect our lives. We college students become isolated because our lifestyle keeps our noses constantly buried in our cell phones and our ears awash in the Decemberists (or whatever it is you kids listen to these days). But it seems counterintuitive that in the 21st century, when communications technology allows us to stay connected to the outside world at all times, we may well be more in the dark than ever because we use that technology to avoid the world rather than take part in it.
Technology will inevitably continue to progress, and our obsession with it is unlikely to ever end. The least we can do is use it to our advantage rather than our detriment. Use your phone to check CNN in addition to ESPN once in a while, or download an NPR news podcast along with whatever new song Kanye West has on iTunes. Don’t quit using your iPhone entirely; just use it for more than the beer pong app.
And for God’s sake, look both ways before you cross the street.
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