Smartphones Didn't Shoot a Student in the Back of the Head

Late last month, a thirty-year-old man walked onto a light rail car in San Francisco and shot a twenty-year-old student in the back of the head. The student, Justin Valdez, died. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, any chance for interference was obviated by the other passengers' general lack of awareness. Video of the incident reportedly shows passengers on the Muni vehicle totally absorbed in their cell phones, oblivious to the gunman brandishing his weapon and ignorant of the murder about to take place.

With scenarios like this, the anti-smartphone screeds and tirades about self-absorbed "millenials" are just waiting to be written. Already, even the Chronicle headline, “Absorbed device users oblivious to danger,” attributes a certain degree of fault to our obsession with our phones. So is this yet another sign that we are far too consumed with our technological innovations to the detriment of all else? Even though society’s smartphone infatuation is certainly problematic, the answer is probably no.

Admittedly, I have not seen the video of the crime. I imagine it is incredibly upsetting and enraging to watch an apparently random murder take place, especially when those in the vicinity of that murder take no action and are seemingly too preoccupied to even notice. Of course, I wish that someone had seen what was going on and successfully interfered. There is no doubt that this was tragic and avoidable—Valdez shouldn’t be dead.

But doubt emerges when we misplace our emotions and start demonizing cell phones as somehow implicated in this murder.

A city, and especially that city’s public transportation systems, can be overwhelming. It’s a normal human impulse to want to create one’s own space, to stay within the bounds of our own minds instead of dealing with the noise, the smells, the unwanted attention that surrounds us. Messing around with a cell phone is just one of many ways we create that space. Cell phones are a tool, not the cause, of our desire to be left alone.

Or to look at the issue in a different light, think about this: what if everyone on the Muni carriage had been doing something lo-tech? What if they had been engrossed in a book? From personal experience, I know I’m just as unaware, perhaps even more so, when involved in an intricate fictional plot as I am when I’m trying to win a game of Dots. If each passenger had been reading instead of playing Candy Crush, answering text messages, or whatever else they were doing (quite frankly, they could’ve been reading an e-book), how would that change our perception of this crime or other similar situations?

It’s hard to imagine officials decrying the act of reading, or even of just plain zoning-out, as somehow being a factor in murder. To be fair, those officials quoted in the Chronicle piece never directly say cell phones are to blame, but rather than we need to be more balanced in our relationship with them in order to become less vulnerable.

But my point stands: new technology is a scapegoat. We would never hear officially sanctioned statements about balancing our love affair with books in order to minimize crime. We love books, we read books in public, and sometimes reading books in public means not noticing other things going on. But replace books with phones and it’s a different tale entirely.

We shouldn’t blame cell phones for tragic events like this. With or without them, we will likely never be hyper-vigilant enough to stop all the sense crimes we wish we could. So why don’t we lay the blame where it belongs: on the shooter.

@heyiamlex