16% and 76%?

[mbarker]

Here's a fun bit from the news today. In some kind of sidewalk survey (no, they didn't go into details about how they got these numbers), the news people report that:

1. 16% of smartphone users say they have run into someone while looking at their smartphone.
2. 76% of people walking in the street say someone looking at their smartphone has run into them.

Now, even assuming that the reports of something like 50% of the people having smartphones are correct, there's something funny about those numbers. Either the folks who are looking at their smartphones are running into a heck of a lot of people, or maybe they aren't remembering how often they bump people? Or maybe the people who are just walking have a different idea of what "run into" means?

Maybe some of each?

The reporter didn't even seem to notice that having a very small percentage run into a very large percentage seems inconsistent.

Is this what they mean by encounters of the smart phone kind?

Comments

[dialyn.livejournal.com]

I'm a little alarmed that we now think we should have no responsibility for ourselves but want machines to do all the alerting. It seems like we are going in the wrong direction, somehow. And that direction is being decided by someone other than ourselves.

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

You mean... look up and around, and actually take charge of our own lives? Yeah. It could work...