Texting While Walking

Texting While Walking: The filmmaker Casey Neistat explores the hazards of text messaging while walking in New York City.

Navigating the sidewalks of New York City can be as challenging as any rushing sport, like football or rugby.  But when your opponents are walking while text messaging, their field of view is impaired, and this can render a three-block walk to Starbucks somewhere between infuriating and life-threatening.

 

While there’s little current data about the number of people injured while texting, more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 after they were injured while using a cellphone to talk or text. That had doubled each year since 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio State University.

I wanted to make a movie about this issue for years, and got started after a discussion with my friend Benny Safdie on the proper, courteous way to text while walking.   By mastering the etiquette of texting, I hope we can gain more control over our increasingly electronic lives.  Let’s stop acting like hollowed-out zombies, with BlackBerrys and iPhones replacing eye contact, handshakes and face-to-face conversations.  It’s time to live once again in the present and simply be where we are. 

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