[Ed Gordon:] You might think that you're good at multitasking, but keeping that cell phone to your ear while driving isn't such a good idea as commentator Clarence Page tells us.
[Clarence Page:] If you're driving while using a cell phone while listening to this broadcast, put down the cell phone or pull over right now. A new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found drivers who use cell phones are four times-Four times!-more likely to get into serious collisions even if they use hands-free headsets. A friend of mine told me about it while I was driving to work this morning. Seriously, we all know that yacking on cell phones can be as dangerous as any other distraction behind the wheel. That's why Chicago, New York, Washington, DC, and New Jersey have all passed laws to ban cell phone use while driving unless you've got a headset, but I'm both frightened and fascinated by the possibility that it's the cell phone itself. No matter how many hands grip the steering wheel and no matter whether you've got a headset or not, it's so much more distracting than, say, your car radio or your iPod or your CD player. That's not news to communications professors like Paul Levinson at Fordham University. He's been writing for years about the telephone as a medium. Unlike radio or TV, Professor Levinson says, the phone engages us differently because it is a two-way medium, interactive. Our eyes watch one thing at a time. Our ears are built for multitasking. Our brains respond differently to a real conversation than they do to a one-way presentation. That's what makes the telephone more demanding of our attention. Professor Levinson told me all of this on his cell phone. At the time, he was not driving. Neither was I. The conversation got me to thinking. If radio is theater of the mind, the cell phone must be a "Star Trek" transporter, bringing people to us, taking us to other places, making us forget about the place we really are. So that's why you hear people shouting their personal business into their cell phones on trains and planes and on the street, secrets loud enough for the rest of us to hear even if we'd rather not. Don't forget where you are, dear listener, and drive carefully.
[Ed Gordon:] Clarence Page is a Washington-based syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune. This is NPR News.