And cell phones cause far, far fewer accidents than playing with the radio or eating or rubbernecking or children in the car or driver fatigue. Why not put your efforts into changing those behaviors that are far, far more likely to cause accidents rather than jumping on the trendy “OMFG!!! Cell phones are so dangerous!” bandwagon?
You want to know why cell phones get such a bad rap? Because you can legislate against cellphones. Just try and pass a law banning children in cars or outlawing rubbernecking. Cell phone laws allow politicians to beat their chests and loudly proclaim that they are “doing something to protect the public”, even thought studies show that cell phones aren’t the biggest problem, or even much of a problem at all.
Oh, so iPods aren’t the least bit pretentious? Please… Tell that to the folks who get mugged because they happen to be wearing a pair of white earbuds. Or the folks who buy a Shuffle because it makes a nice fashion accessory.
I was just discussing this in a marketing meeting today, coincidentally. Design is a HUGE reason why Apple has been able to resurrect its brand. It’s the reason why they can charge more for a portable music player with less capacity. It’s the reason why they’re selling krillions of the damned things while other portable music players that kick the iPod’s ass in the tech spec realm are selling, like, not at all.
But that’s not the point. The issue isn’t whether the Bluetooth headsets are more Apple or Alienware. It’s what the design has to do with douchebagginess.
I have a hard time believing VCO3 is a real human being. He can’t actually be getting this worked up over the phone accessories of another person, especially when they don’t affect his life in any way at all.
He’s probably one of those mad men you see on the subway that have all the answers and is more than willing to give them out for free as long as you can stomach the fact he hasn’t bathed in 3 weeks because that would make him “pseudo-hip” and that’s the worst thing in the world you could ever be.
plus the date implies that a more complete study should have been reported since then, would be my guess. Kind of sloppy on AAA’s part not post anything about the followup on that page. Here is the press release for the followup study, which echoes the first study’s results.
The problem I see with this study, however, is it only tracks the % of time drivers engaged in a particular distracting activity, not the degree to which that activity is distracting!!! In other words, it proves nothing about how distracting any given activity is.
