Texting while walking in China

Do you text while you’re walking down the street? Do you check your emails, browse Twitter, update your oh so important and well-loved Instagram account as you stumble along, oblivious of the outside world and the death glare I’m giving you? I’m torn, you see: I can’t decide what I think of you. Either those people blithely tripping along a crowded high street, head down, nose pressed to their smartphone screen, are subnormal – incapable of processing the outside world unmediated through the camera screen, the text message, the cat video – or they’re supremely arrogant. I tend towards the latter interpretation. The not very subtle body language runs like this: “I’m checking my phone, because I’m super-important; it’s your job not to collide with me, because you are nobody.”

I don’t like being nobody. I don’t like having to dodge out the way of phone-possessed imbeciles any more than I would like to be run over by cars – what’s why I don’t walk in the road. Nor do I actively enjoy fantasising about setting off along 3rd Avenue with my arm held out rigidly horizontal in an aeroplane splint, smacking into the faces of people too engrossed in Angry titting Birds to glance up once in a while in case there are any hazards in their path.

And yet, with the news that China has introduced “Texting While Walking-only” sidewalks for the 4G-addicted, I do dream of it.

There you go, phone-addicts: not only have you made me a worse person than I already was, but you’re the sort of person China – China – will make special allowances for. This sidewalk reserved for people who need to check the status of their plummeting shares portfolio. This one reserved for government agents on their way to arrest Ai Weiwei. Are you proud of yourselves?

There you go, phone-addicts: not only have you made me a worse person than I already was, but you’re the sort of person China – China – will make special allowances for

On the subject of speaking out against idiot autocracies: in New York I found myself thinking how real a shame it is that so many Americans can’t understand or refuse to bow to the overwhelming evidence in support of evolution. If they bought into it, they could pin their hopes on the random mutation which will set one human eye drifting to the apex of the skull, so that with head bent the phone-checking myrmidon will also be able to see where he’s going. O, brave new world that would have such device-slaves in it! Until then, though I’m not a violent man, it remains my fervent wish to see two such people collide head-on, their phones fall to the ground and smash, and for the startled pair to engage in a conversation that might be violent but would, at least, be real. C