John Roughan: How phones drive you to distraction

The coming week is the last when drivers can legally put cellphones to their ear or tap out a text while steering. Nearly everyone seems to agree with the ban coming into force from November but a question remains. Why only phones?

Why is a phone call more distracting than a radio in the car? Or the GPS if you have one? Or a conversation with a passenger?

These comparisons are a worry. They have been drawn not in opposition to a phone prohibition but to imply more restrictions would be wise. It is not clear that even traffic officials know why they are cracking down on phones and not lesser distractions.

When the Automobile Association, the Insurance Council, even Telecom and other mobile network owners all advocated a ban, officials quibbled that phones were not the only hazard in cars and statistics did not put them among the worst causes of accidents.

They needed to put aside their data and read some media theory.

It is a long time since Marshall McLuhan wrote his book Understanding Media. Everyone quoted it when I was an undergraduate. At least they thought the title profound.

I've always wondered whether many actually opened the book because it had almost nothing to do with the postmodernist nonsense the title suggests. It was about the effect of different technology on the mind.

McLuhan distinguished various media by the mental effort they demanded of the receiver. Writing in the 1960s, when television was the new medium and everyone was agog at its power, he noted how little effort it required of the viewer.

Television put pictures and words into the brain and left little to the imagination. It is a relaxing, not to say soporific, medium. In McLuhan's classification, media such as movies and television were "cold" because he held that messages the brain received too easily had less lasting informative force.

Radio was much less "cold". It fed sounds into the head and the listener's mind had to create pictures.

At the other end of the scale were printed ("hot") media which had more lasting informative power because it forced the receiver to create the scene.

You can test this when you read a good book, then go to a film somebody has made of it. Usually the film disappoints. The pictures your mind made were more vivid.

I'm not sure McLuhan had much to say about telephones but I think he would classify them as extremely hot. They demand intense mental concentration at both ends of the transmission.

The speakers cannot see each other. They compensate for the lack of visual signals by putting all their effort into their verbal connection.

When you are in a face-to-face conversation with someone whose phone rings, they turn their full attention to the phone. They give you just enough eye contact to discourage you from leaving but otherwise you might as well be a statue.

This was annoying enough when telephones were wired down, now that they can ring in the pocket and interrupt conversations anywhere, it is infuriating. We may long for cellphone users to develop an etiquette for them but really the technology is to blame; a conversation between people who cannot see each other needs their undivided attention. Face-to-face we cannot compete.

For the caller in the car, the road cannot compete. The driver's eyes are inwardly focussed on the conversation. The car is a constant afterthought.

A conversation with a passenger is quite different. Even without glancing at the passenger the driver is receiving many more visual and aural signals than can be transmitted by phone. The driver can easily focus on the road and converse.

Likewise with the radio, the GPS or anything else that does not demand a dialogue. They do not command the driver's attention to the same degree.

A car phone on speaker is probably equally distracting. When the Insurance Council urged action on drivers' phones it made no exception for hands-free. The AA too said it would prefer a complete ban. Transport officials commissioned research that showed drivers' loss of concentration had little to do with whether they held the phone or not.

From next month only hand-held use will be illegal. That at least can be seen for the law to be enforced. So much business is done on phones from cars these days, particularly on congested roads, that it would be costly to forbid hands-free calls too.

But, let's not pretend they are any safer. Telephones in any form demand our exclusive attention. The sooner they are displaced by audio-visual devices the better. The driver who knows they can be seen driving can focus more intently on the road.