A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (46 page)

This kind of marketing that celebrated constant connectivity drove Reggie nuts. There was one TV commercial he saw in the summer of 2012 in which a young woman was getting into her car, bragging about how her new phone service gave her the ability to get data anytime and anywhere. It didn’t show her driving, but the idea that rankled Reggie was: “I was that guy. I was the guy on the phone all the time.” He thought: Why not put the phone down and get in the moment “and enjoy yourself a little.”

Years ago, public safety advocates concerned with distracted driving focused on the marketing of cell phone companies, which were pushing the idea of the “car phone.” Now, safety advocates say, the most potentially destructive marketing and product design comes from a different industry, the carmakers. In recent years, they’ve made a big push toward creating “infotainment” systems that feature touchscreens in the dashboard to allow navigation, access to all kinds of media, including satellite radio and playlists, and even some video content.

The latest are systems that allow voice-activated commands so a person can stay connected to all kinds of Internet functions while driving. For instance, a driver can dictate a text or an email or a Facebook update. High-end BMWs already allow drivers to dictate emails or send texts, and the Chevrolet Sonic lets drivers compose texts to an iPhone. More than half of all new cars will integrate some type of voice recognition by 2019, according to the electronics consulting firm IMS Research.

In early 2013, General Motors announced partnership with AT&T to bring Wi-Fi hotspots to cars. The carmaker’s chief executive, Daniel Akerson, formerly a telecommunications executive, was quoted as telling Reuters that the business potential was big.

“I have grandchildren that have only grown up in a world with smartphones,” Akerson said. “With a 4G pipe into a car, you can change the business model almost entirely—for example, what happens if when the logo shows on your screen, it says ‘brought to you by Allstate’? How many times is that going to pop? And how much can you get from Allstate?”

In April 2013, for example, Audi put out a press release announcing a partnership with T-Mobile, the cell phone provider, and heralding: “the industry’s most competitively priced in-vehicle data plan—providing Wi-Fi for up to 8 connected devices, a full suite of Google search and mapping services, and Sirius XM traffic information through Audi Connect.” The press release touted a new video called Beach Day, which, as the company explained: our driver quickly and easily plans an outing on the go while chatting with her mother in-vehicle. “The video shows how Audi Connect can soothe anxieties associated with day-to-day travel by enabling users to make plans on-the-fly, calculate the distance to gas stations, access real-time weather info and locate nearby points-of-interest.”

The carmakers have said the systems are safer because they keep the driver’s hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road.

There’s a catch. A groundbreaking study by Dr. Strayer in 2013, which relied on assistance from Dr. Gazzaley, among other top neuroscientists, found that the voice-activated commands are actually more dangerous for drivers than talking on a phone, even a handheld one. The reason is that, even though a driver’s hands may be on the wheel and their eyes on the road, their minds are elsewhere—captured by the technology. The act of talking to these systems, even when they work seamlessly (meaning: no dictation problems), engages speech processing, as well as the parts of the brain involved in planning the construction of the command. As a result, drivers are significantly less likely to see an obstacle, stay focused on the road, and more likely to suffer inattention blindness.

The carmakers have good reason for wanting to sell these gadgets: consumers say they want them. That’s a big thing for auto companies faced with the problem that people are tending to hold on longer to their cars before buying new ones. Offering new technology is a way to get people into the showroom to consider a new purchase, says Ronald Montoya, the consumer advice editor for Edmunds.com, a car research firm. The technology “is getting people to try new cars rather than stick with buying used cars,” he says.

According to Montoya, the next trend is “integration with apps that are on your phone—having them display onto the screen itself.”

Speaking of screens, as they were getting commonplace in cars, they were growing in size, too. In the Tesla, the hip electric car, there was a seventeen-inch screen, which Montoya described as “essentially a 17-inch-high iPad that controls everything in the car.” It’s “cool,” he adds, but as a consumer advocate he’d prefer something more direct, like an old-fashioned push button that lets a driver control air-conditioning, heat, or the radio so “you don’t have to dig through a couple of screens in the menu. Even turning up the volume is a touchscreen, which is not as responsible as you just turning a dial.”

David Teater, a former auto industry executive, has concerns about these innovations. He knows the risk of driver distraction firsthand. His own son was killed by a young woman who was driving while talking on her phone, an event that turned Teater into one of the foremost advocates for curbing distracted driving, particularly cell phone use by drivers.

He says that all the glorification by automakers of technology use by drivers “normalizes” the behavior.

“The more the automakers make these standard in a vehicle, the more this is what you do.”

He likens the marketing of devices in the car to the cigarette industry. “It’s almost like back in the day of the tobacco industry. The automakers are saying: ‘We need more research, we need more research,’ and they keep building all the technology into vehicles, which is normalizing the behavior and making it harder and harder down the road to say: ‘We’re killing all these people, we need to stop.’ ”

SOME IN THE TECHNOLOGY
industry were acknowledging the issues of distraction. In an article published in July 2012, in the
New York Times
, I outlined how the idea that devices, sites like Facebook, and video games could be addictive was being embraced by, of all people and places, the leaders in Silicon Valley. The conversation was happening inside Facebook, and Google, and at companies making the huge telecommunications infrastructure delivering that technology, like Cisco. They were talking, for the first time in any focused way, about the role of dopamine, how the brain might be impacted by the technology—the constancy of pings and demands for attention, how it might even be addictive.

People at those companies began experimenting with different approaches—such as meditation or scheduling technology breaks—to keep employees focused and productive, not scattered and creatively drained.

“If you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it’ll boil to death—it’s a nice analogy,” Stuart Crabb, director of learning and development at Facebook, told me for the story. People “need to notice the effect that time online has on your performance and relationships.”

He and hundreds of other people from major companies like Twitter, eBay, and PayPal were getting involved in the Wisdom 2.0 conference, aimed at helping people find downtime, get offline. In the story, I also spoke to Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google, who said, “Consumers need to have an internal compass where they’re able to balance the capabilities that technology offers them for work, for search, with the qualities of the lives they live off-line.”

“It’s about creating space, because otherwise we can be swept away by our technologies.”

But the article pointed out that these companies were still predicating their business models—making money—on keeping people connected all the time.

ON THE POLICY FRONT
, the Department of Transportation in 2010 did pilot tests in two cities, Hartford, Connecticut, and Syracuse, New York, in which they did public-service announcements about the public-safety dangers and risk of criminal penalties from illegal phone use by drivers. The campaign was coupled with heavy law enforcement activities: police in Syracuse gave out 9,587 citations, and in Hartford, 9,658.

The federal agency tracked behavior before and after the campaigns and claimed to find a decided difference in cell phone use by drivers. In Syracuse, the agency said, phone use and texting dropped by a third, while in Harford, the agency found a 57 percent drop in handheld phone use, while texting dropped by three-quarters. The agency pledged to do more such campaigns, which it called “Phone in One Hand, Ticket in the Other” and was modeled after the seat belt effort “Click It or Ticket.”

Harsha says that only so many lessons can be drawn because of the intensive resources the campaign demanded in Syracuse and Hartford, including the use of “spotters” who relayed what they saw to other officers down the road. Not an inexpensive or simple solution, she says. “I’m not convinced that enforcement and education alone will solve the problem, especially when enforcement is so difficult.”

By the middle of 2014, laws banning texting had grown in popularity but were neither uniform nor universal, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. For instance, the group reports, Arizona, Montana, South Carolina, and Puerto Rico have no bans, while Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Mississippi only ban novice drivers from texting. And a handful of other states have bans that are “secondary” laws, meaning a driver can’t be pulled over merely for texting and driving, but only cited if the driver is doing something else wrong (a primary offense). Only twelve states and the District of Columbia have bans on the use of handheld phones by drivers. But around the country, even where there are laws, texting continues basically unabated, and so does the disconnect: Drivers say overwhelmingly that it is risky, but they can’t stop themselves from doing it, or don’t want to. In the summer of 2013, Kars4Kids, a car-donation charity, did a survey of drivers that illustrates the wide gap between behavior and attitude. The survey found that 98 percent consider texting and driving to be dangerous, but 43 percent of those surveyed read texts, and 30 percent sent them. There was another interesting statistic: 46 percent of passengers said they had texted while the driver was driving. In other words, rather than focus on the driver, or help the driver focus on the road, the passengers were more interested in their devices. “And the carnage keeps piling up,” Dr. Strayer told me in late October of 2013, seven years after Reggie’s accident. He was getting ready to fly from Salt Lake City to San Francisco to testify in a deposition of a lawsuit in which a woman was using her phone and ran over and killed a pedestrian. He said he gets a call once a week to get involved in a legal case.

When Reggie got behind the wheel on September 22, 2006, he could perhaps have made the argument he’d not heard much about nor understood the risks of texting. He’d be the first to say that didn’t make his behavior excusable; he’d been taught to be an attentive person, and driver. It was raining as he crossed through the mountains, the sun just rising, on the commute that would forever alter his and others’ lives. The people responding to the latest surveys can’t claim they are ignorant of the risks of texting. They own up to it. They know the truth, if they can only get themselves to listen to it.

To Ms. Harsha, progress made by the safety community runs smack into a case of collective denial, reinforced by powerful marketing messages urging people to stay connected. “The culture is: ‘It’s not me, it’s you. I’m the good driver.’

“Part of education is getting people to face up to their own behavior.”

IN MARCH OF 2014
, Terryl got a big honor. She was appointed to the Utah State Board of Education by Governor Gary Herbert. In choosing Terryl, the governor lauded her efforts as a victim’s advocate and said: “Her experience will greatly benefit the families of Utah.”

THE NEUROSCIENTISTS, IN ADDITION
to pursuing individual efforts to understand the impact of technology use on the brain, were stepping up their collaborative efforts. In 2013, Dr. Gazzaley, Dr. Strayer, Dr. Atchley, and other leaders in the field earned a joint grant to study the power of nature to rebuild tired brains, restore them. They met together in the spring of 2014 to embark on this new quest.

“People say: ‘I put down the phone and hang out on the beach or go camping or rafting or fishing and I feel so rested.’ We’re trying to prove the biological basis of that,” Dr. Strayer says, adding that the research is more in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau than of Donders and Helmholtz, Broadbent and Treisman and Posner. “Too much technology,” Strayer argues, “can corrupt the soul.”

Dr. Atchley takes a more scientific approach to the same question, connecting the dots between spending some time away from technology and finding some truth, making clearer-headed decisions.

“To make a choice, you need frontal lobes active, and need few enough competitors in other parts of the brain so that you can engage systems to make a decision,” he says. “You have to have the capacity.”

“An ethicist would say we all have a choice, but a brain scientist will tell you that choice starts in the brain.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I
MET REGGIE IN
August 2009, shortly after he’d gotten out of jail and not long after I had found myself in the middle of the rarest of journalistic maelstroms. It had begun the previous December—right about the time that Reggie was deciding to cop a plea—when I had a conversation with Adam Bryant, an editor and close friend at the
New York Times
.

We were talking about the concept of driving while using a cell phone. It was, on one level, just another conversation. Adam and I chewed on everything that came across our minds—chats that lived in the gray area journalists themselves inhabit that involves remarking on everything in the world in a casual way while also wondering aloud if the things we’d observed merit a story.

Among the topics Adam and I had often discussed was the impact of technology on behavior and society. We were looking for “disconnects,” places where things didn’t work as advertised, or where people made assumptions or presumptions—say, the inherent good of technology—that weren’t necessarily borne out. Silicon Valley, which I was covering, was a fruitful area for lots of journalists trying to get at the underbelly of this explosion in personal communications.