Texting Bans Confront a Powerful Social Force

"Text-end: When a text-messaging distracted driver rear-ends the vehicle in front of (him). ..."

— urbandictionary.com

What possibly could be more obviously stupid than this: Operating a motor vehicle while staring at a tiny illuminated screen, using your thumb to tap out a message on an alphanumeric keyboard or trying to decipher an incoming message?

Driving While Texting (DWT) has proven more spectacularly dangerous than talking on a cell phone while driving or even applying cosmetics in a rearview mirror while driving one-handed.

Consider the commuter train that crashed in Los Angeles last year, leaving 25 dead. The operator was alleged to have been preoccupied with text messaging. More recently, 49 people were injured in Boston when a text-messaging trolly driver caused a collision.

The sense of risk to public safety has grown so great that last week Missouri lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting drivers 21 or younger from DWT. This from the same bunch that earlier passed a bill making it O.K. for adults to ride a motorcycle without a helmet.

The Illinois legislature, meanwhile, is debating a bill that would prohibit drivers of any age from engaging in the practice.

Skeptics — such as Gizmodo, a popular online gadget guide — correctly observed that "it's pretty redundant to make laws outlawing texting while driving because it already falls under laws covering distracted driving, but ... something needs to be done about it."

Indeed, something does need to be done.

Texting has become a captivating and powerful social force. Anyone with teenagers knows that texting is supplanting even cell phones as a principal form of mobile, peer-to-peer communication. Kids on the move send texts to make plans, check in and even to engage in extended conversation.

But it's not just for teenagers any more. President Barack Obama used text messaging to stay in touch with his army of young supporters and volunteers during last year's presidential campaign.

What's more, there is a raft of research on how text messaging could become a valuable educational tool — such as reminding students of pending assignments and upcoming activities.

Texting also is being investigated as a means to promote public health — reinforcing to patients when the next round of prescription drugs should be taken or the timing of medical appointments.

The power — and the danger — of text messages is that they command your attention. They distract you, however momentarily, from everything else around you — including traffic and the road ahead.

Breaking the spell depends on more than a legal ban. It requires convincing teenagers — and certain adults — that texting is stupid and dangerous. That hasn't worked to well for cigarette smoking, but maybe it will for DWT.

Gizmodo suggests a darkly comic final text message: "im dead, lol."

(Editors note for the uninitiated: Text messages often are written entirely in lowercase letters and are sporadically punctuated. They make frequent use of acronyms; "lol", for example, means "laughing out loud.")

DWT, of course, is no laughing matter.

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