Engrossed by their smartphones, passengers on a San Francisco Muni train didn’t notice a man on board brandishing a pistol until he had shot and killed a student. City authorities have expressed concern about the passengers’ “collective inattention to imminent danger.” Will Oremus elaborates:
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon told the Chronicle he worries that technology is exacerbating the problem. “These weren’t concealed movements,” he said. “The gun is very clear. These people are in very close proximity with him, and nobody sees this. They’re just so engrossed, texting and reading and whatnot.” Authorities have been warning for years that people’s texting, browsing, and gaming habits make them more vulnerable to phone-snatchings, not to mention being beaned with a basketball by Baron Davis. But Gascon is among the first to suggest that smartphone users are putting their neighbors at risk as well when they block out the world and lose themselves in Candy Crush.
But Lex Berko charges that smartphones have become a scapegoat:
From personal experience, I know I’m just as unaware, perhaps even more so, when involved in an intricate fictional plot as I am when I’m trying to win a game of Dots. If each passenger had been reading instead of playing Candy Crush, answering text messages, or whatever else they were doing (quite frankly, they could’ve been reading an e-book), how would that change our perception of this crime or other similar situations? … We would never hear officially sanctioned statements about balancing our love affair with books in order to minimize crime. We love books, we read books in public, and sometimes reading books in public means not noticing other things going on. But replace books with phones and it’s a different tale entirely.
And Joe Eskenazi makes an uncomfortable point:
Authorities are preaching vigilance, which is probably a smarter thing to do than play Angry Birds. But left unsaid is just what the hell a train full of vigilant people were supposed to do if they noticed a man waving about a pistol – a man, specifically, in search of a random passenger to murder. What then?
(Photo of texting Muni passengers by Flickr user ejbSF)
The Dish 