Peripheral Vision and Situational Awareness

In today’s modern world, evil is finding new loopholes to exploit. One of those loopholes is something we created for ourselves. Combined with the Smartphone, a device we nearly worship every single day, that loophole will end up costing lives.

What is that loophole? We have limited our Peripheral Vision to within a mere six inches long and a variable three to four inches wide. That cripples our Situational Awareness to a high degree.

A long time ago, when Smartphones became an instant love affair, teenagers were leaving school with their faces buried in that tiny glowing screen. They earned a friendly meme at the time. “Blue Face Zombies” because they tended to walk slower while the glow of their smartphone lit up their faces with a blue hue.

An experiment was also run about a decade ago. A fake kidnapping was set up as High School let out. The teenage girl screamed and hollered, got stuffed into a white van and it sped off. The teens who were all around her?

None of them saw anything. By the time they pulled their eyes off of their smartphone, she was long gone. Nobody saw any faces, no count of the kidnappers, or what kind of getaway vehicle was used. They couldn’t even name who was grabbed.

The students got a friendly warning. Keep up this terrible Smartphone behavior, they could end up kidnapped for real, raped and killed.

The message was forgotten by the end of the week.

It’s not just students anymore. Adults across all walks of life has succumbed to this nightmare waiting to happen. I was in the Emergency Room a few months back, and I didn’t take my smartphone with me on purpose.

I felt like an oddball. Everyone was using their Smartphone. Some lady next to me kept loading images and sharing it with her neighbor, who didn’t give a flipping damn if the image was cute or not. She simply tolerated the screen share syndrome that her ‘friend’ was afflicted with.

It was a process of limited vision for everyone. I realized I could rob everyone there, and the police would have no description of me. Everyone would end up checking their Smartphones to see if I got recorded somehow in the background.

I swear, we are dooming ourselves with this garbage.

Because of this, I rarely use my Smartphone. The world around me has expanded. I noticed a lovely bird perched on a nearby tree branch. A pair of squirrels were playing tag with each other. The wind smelled nice. Nobody else got to see or experience that. Their eyes got filled with the haze of the screen glow and nothing else.

I am a lone wolf now. I live in a highly populated world filled with people who don’t even know that they exist side by side with others, and nothing else about the space they share.

How far we have fallen as an intelligent species who used to be explorers and adventurers. Will that ever come back?

Our future is unknown at this point, but it doesn’t look good.