by Matt Richtel
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 did
n’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.
Part of my curiosity was also personal. I was watching how technology was altering my own behavior. I could see that I was spending a lot of time with media, changing my communications patterns, feeling a tick of anxiety when away from my device, using it to escape from uncomfortable moments or boredom, even when behind the wheel. It wasn’t so much that I saw this technology as bad or good, but simply as powerful.
In 2003, I’d written a piece for the Sunday business section called “The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive?” I started the story with a venture capitalist who was sitting at a conference he’d paid $2,000 to attend, but he said he wasn’t paying attention at all to the goings on because he was simultaneously on his laptop and his phone. “It’s hard to concentrate on one thing,” he said in the story. “I think I have a condition.”
I was also observing, professionally and personally, the extraordinary power of technology, as a productivity tool and a tool for liberation and creativity. Thanks to technology, I didn’t have to work in New York, but could be in San Francisco, which allowed me to write about Silicon Valley, be immersed in it. I could talk to my editors daily, hourly, whenever, and file my stories from my home office or on the go. I once wrote a front-page story about the legal arguments made in a lawsuit against Napster, the music-file-sharing company, while sitting on the floor outside the courtroom on the Ninth Circuit in downtown San Francisco, and then called the story in to my editors by cell phone.
I discovered that technology, by providing such flexibility, could make me not just more efficient but, in a way, more creative. I could work when and if the muse hit. I could also take breaks more easily, say, jet off to the gym during lunch, and take my phone to make sure I wasn’t missing something. At the time, I didn’t realize how much more effective that could make me, but something visceral spoke to me about the power to have more control over my life.
This piece, this liberation, was its own mixed blessing. I wasn’t putting so fine a point on it at the time, but I was beginning to wrestle in my own life with questions of efficiency and opportunity. So what if we could do more work? So what if we could stay in touch all the time? Should we? It was thinking that would evolve in no small part thanks to my interactions with Reggie.
At the time, back before I met him, these conflicting forces helped fuel and indulge a muse that bowled me over in 2004. I wrote a novel called Hooked: A Thriller About Love and Other Addictions, that posited about the addictive powers of technology and whether it might change our realities and perceptions. It was more science fiction than science, but I did borrow from some of the fledgling science I’d discovered in the story I wrote for the paper a year earlier. Technology was the culprit in the book, and no small companion and collaborator in helping me write and then publicize the book.
WHEN ADAM AND I started talking in December 2008, we decided I’d start looking into what Adam calls a “smart dumb question” regarding one particular issue: Why are people using their phones while driving? Isn’t that dangerous? Shouldn’t they know better?
The following spring, I started reporting the story as I took on other daily assignments. It was something of a right of passage for me as a reporter to be asked to look into something in some depth, to be allowed the time to investigate something that might not bear fruit. I took my time, and I learned a lot.
I made a trip to Utah and spent time meeting with Dr. Strayer, who’d clearly distinguished himself as a leader in the field. While there, I also talked to the family of Lauren Mulkey, the young woman who was seventeen years old when she’d gone out with friends for Saint Patrick’s Day and got killed by a distracted driver. When I returned from that reporting trip, I sent a memo to Adam that explained much of Dr. Strayer’s research, and that summarized other things I’d discovered, like the growing research on texting (not just in Dr. Strayer’s lab but at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute), and I wrote to him about what seemed like a somewhat startling discovery: allegations that the federal government had known about the risks of using a phone while driving well back around 2000 and had essentially buried that information for political reasons.
My memo proposed we write a story “that weaves one very human tale of a fatal accident along with the emerging science and, pointedly: the evidence that the government has been slow to release clear evidence of dangers of cell phones in cars. In fact, I can almost see a parallel structure in this story: our protagonists not paying attention to the road while the government is not paying attention to the evidence.”
As my reporting continued, I found other stories—tragic, terrible tales. One of them was the story of Linda Doyle, who, in September 2008, had been driving in Oklahoma City, not far from her house, when she was killed by another motorist, Christopher Hill. Hill had been talking on his phone and had run a red light at high speeds.
On July 19, 2009, the paper ran on its front page a long, ambitious narrative that weaved the collision of Hill and Doyle into a story about the science, politics, and policy around distracted driving. It was so ambitious because we thought this was it, one story aimed at putting a stamp on this issue. Underscoring how much we invested in that story was an added element of presentation: The New York Times produced a video game, a sort of driving simulator, that people could play to test their own abilities to multitask.
We thought the article might have legs, but we were blown away by what happened. The story just took off. It got picked up by lots of media, and was viewed and emailed in big numbers on the New York Times website. It received 655 comments, which, within even a year, would not seem such a big deal, but at the time it was astronomical. People were talking about how the story got at something that they were feeling and experiencing acutely in their own lives.
Because I’d invested so much in reporting in the prior six months, I had a lot of other story ideas in my notebook. We went with the momentum. On July 21, we published a mini-investigative piece that showed that the Department of Transportation, a federal agency, had in 2003 known about and withheld compelling research showing the deadly risks of multitasking behind the wheel. The story explained that the federal agency didn’t publish its data—including estimates that cell phone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002—because of fears of angering Congress. (Congress had previously admonished the Department of Transportation to avoid certain political issues.)
In the story, I quoted Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety, as saying: “We’re looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up.”
On the next Sunday, July 27, we published a story about research from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute that showed texting by truck drivers increased risk of crash or near crash by twenty-three times. The story also talked about Dr. Strayer’s research. At the time, fourteen states had banned texting while driving, including Utah.
The reaction to the articles was something my editors said they’d rarely seen, and whereas we thought I’d do one or two stories on the subject, now my editors wanted to know what else was in my notebook.
“There’s a guy I’ve heard about in Utah,” I told Adam. “His name is Reggie Shaw.”
TERRYL PICKED ME UP at the airport. She was as perky as she’d been on the phone, and at once friendly and intense. What most stuck out in our conversation as we drove up I-15 was something totally unrelated to the story. She talked about how she wanted to encourage young Mormon women to go to college before they got married, or at least to find some sense of purpose to go along with having and raising a family. This seems pretty basic, but she was from Logan, where people got married young and had kids, and that was the point. She wan
ted to shake up her environment and challenge assumptions.
I also was struck by the crash site. It was the scene of horrific violence, and yet it was surrounded by abject beauty. You could see how Brigham Young would’ve come over the mountains into Utah and thought: This is it.
In the Cache County prosecutor’s office, I met Leila and Jackie. Leila was still nearly inconsolable with grief.
I first met Reggie in Tremonton, I believe. He wouldn’t go to the crash site. It was too painful. I did drive back with him to Salt Lake City, and he told me the story about the young woman he’d been on a date with who had the newspaper article about him taped to her mirror. Reggie was self-effacing, kind, open, and carrying a deep, open wound.
The article about Reggie ran on August 29, 2009.
IN THE SPRING OF 2010, the paper and I were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, a significant validation that we’d illuminated a widespread hazard, and crediting us with “stimulating widespread efforts to curb distracted driving”; as part of our supporting evidence in the paper’s nomination, we noted that Webster’s dictionary had named “distracted driving” its word of the year in 2009. There was another Pulitzer Prize given that year, to the Washington Post, that had me thinking about the bigger issues at stake with distraction. The spectacular feature story focused on the trial of a man who had been so distracted by a cell phone call that he’d left his son strapped in a car seat in a sweltering car. The car was not moving. The man was not driving. The boy spent nine hours strapped inside the car, and died.
That spring, I embarked on a series of stories called “Your Brain on Computers” about how heavy technology use impacts the brain. I learned more about the addiction side, began to understand the connections between some of these ideas, and kept trying to understand the central paradox: We all know that texting and driving is dangerous, but we do it anyway. Why?