The biggest problem with the digital zombie is not the walking into signposts. It’s more insidious than that, and involves an incurable disharmony with the outside world. A walker strolling down the sidewalk mulling how many exclamation points to append to his or her Facebook status update about walking down the sidewalk is not really here. Studies suggest that he or she is even more disconnected from the actual world than is someone driving 80 miles an hour across west Texas at two in the morning while cranking Carlos Santana.
…Stopping, looking, lifting your head up, searching around you for something… it’s all part of what being human means, of what we evolved to do.
Yes, Wayne Curtis is back again to remind you that you’re doing this walking thing all wrong. Getting to your destination in one piece without causing mayhem isn’t good enough; you’ve got to be absorbing the proper sensory stimuli and thinking about it in the right way to earn his approval. That’s all predictable romantic tripe, of course; I just enjoy the facile way he invokes evolution, of all things, to support his rigid, retrograde definition of what counts as “the actual world,” when, as far as evolution gives a fuck, humans could end up as half-android beings on spaceships eating freeze-dried nutritional powders and getting all their exercise through use of machines.