“Driven to Distraction,” an article written by Debra Galant, I about the many things drivers do while behind the wheel. Everyone obviously has their own comfort ability level while driving, most people tell other people not to talk on the phone or text while they drive, yet they do it so often themselves. Montill Williams, a national director of public affairs for AAA, the travel club, states in the article that: “ Everyone else’s cellphone irritates you, but your own is indispensible. People think its O.K. for tem to do it, but its bad for everyone else.”
Galant says many times how our society is encouraging the distractions while driving by building more and more drive-thrus. How many restaurants now have the convenience of a drive-thru, you’d count almost all of them.
A chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee, named John Wisniewski, states in Galant’s articles that he believes multi-tasking in cars has become a “need, rather than a want. For people like soccer moms and convenience store owners. My biggest driving challenge is drinking a cup of coffee and eating a Krispy Kreme at the same time.
Multi-tasking while driving has different effects depending even on just the state in which someone is. For example “bending over to pick up a dropped French fry in Utah could cause someone to run into a ditch, whereas in somewhere like New York, it would cause a chain reaction and tie up the turnpike for hours”(2).This is just an example of the outcomes of such driving.
In a book called “Digital Being,” written by Nicholas Negroponte, is a book that could be summed up into the writer explaining how technology and digital programmed machines are going to one day “take over the world.”
Negroponte starts part of his introduction by showing the statistics of just how many Americans own desktops or laptops. “35 percent of American families and 50 of American teenagers, have a personal computer at home; 30 million people are estimated to be on the internet; 65 percent of new computers sold worldwide in 1994(5). If so many people are already owning computers to help them do their everyday tasks, obviously people want the easiest way to do things, so they are going to buy those things. Hence the reason technology greatly advances everyday.
To show the determination to get his point across Negroponte says this: “Your telephone won’t ring in discriminately; it will receive, sort and perhaps respond to your incoming calls like a well trained English butler”(6). All of us have one day wondered if our cars are going to be able to fly. Or just how many things are going to drastically change within our lifestyle, Negroponte just makes it clearer to us what types of things these may be.
In comparison to David Nye’s book “Technology Matters,” these two sources raise a lot of the same points as does Nye. Their outlook on the intensions of technology are similar due to the fact that they show how far technology has brought us today and how its still changing everyday in the hopes to make our lives easier.