There are those days when either by nature of some accident or misfortune, we hope to escape our present surroundings, our friends at college, or some acquaintances at the mall, wishing to become invisible or make our presence in such stealth manner as to go virtually undetected.
Well, walking down the college campus of Green River, I happened to learn that in reality, without any efforts, you are invisible. For today, what a student cannot get their eyes off of is their phone, involved in a very recent phenomena called "texting."
Students who are by status much more experienced on campus, who know their surroundings can actually transport from one side of the campus to the other without ever looking up as they are absorbed and glued to their cell phone. It seems that accidents of collision usually happen with the less experienced.
With consequences such as a loss of physical contact, which I take to be very essential for a friendship, or missing out the main points of lecture in your History class, even though these can be classified as minor, there are consequences that are insidious with grave effect.
Virginia Tech Transportation Institute has found out that texting while driving increases your chances of making an accident by 23-times. The study mounted cameras in the cars which carefully monitored every move of the eye, hand, body.
On average, texting took away 4.6 seconds of focus off the road, which driving 55 mph can cover the length of a football field.
With state laws prohibiting texting while driving, it seems as though these laws do to nothing but take the phenomena "underground," below the steering wheel, beside the lap, or texting with the opposite hand you normally text with.
Instead of holding the phone freely in front of you, on top of the steering wheel or dash board, helping to keep your head high, one gets separated by a foot from sight of the road when looking down.
This in effect, makes the parking at Green River Community College a bit harder, or should I say easy? Waiting for a parking space to free up, it is not uncommon for a student to enter oblivion.
Whatever the problem may be, consequences come with everything, and it is our job to weigh in on the risk and benefits of texting, and our duty is to make careful decisions.
But today, it's not about being invisible in a visible world but visible in an invisible world.
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