Onus Probandi

Premise 1:  Most people regularly using social media engage in a process of self-marketing, selective sharing, and misinformation intended to present themselves in whatever light they find most favorable.  This applies to real world social interactions as well, but due to scarcity of information and the subject-provided nature of available information on social media, the effect is much more pronounced.  The result is an “online persona” that does not closely reflect reality, or at least not a wide view of reality.

Premise 2:  Most people regularly using social media receive most of their psychological payoff from the process of self-presentation and perhaps imagining how others may be assessing their “online persona”, as opposed to receiving the psychological payoff from assessing the “online personas” of others.  That is to say, it is an essentially narcissistic activity.

Premise 3:  The ubiquity of smartphones and the ability to use these devices to access social media via cell phone networks has resulted in more distractions to persons operating vehicles in public, thereby making driving/riding in a vehicle a significantly more dangerous proposition than it was immediately before the propagation of smartphones.

Conclusion:  People take much higher risk on themselves, and impose higher risk on others, when participating in social media while driving.  The risk versus reward equation is perverse, as the reward for participating is either to increase your consumption of inaccurate or misleading information about others (not what we traditionally think of as rewarding behavior) or else to receive the psychological payoff of an activity entirely narcissistic (i.e. grooming and presenting your “online persona”).  Such narcissism is not illogical as an incentive for increasing one’s risk, however the increased risk to others means that we ought not tolerate such behavior as a society. 

To clarify this last point: if people were causing more car accidents because they were constantly looking in handheld mirrors in order to admire their own physical reflections, we would probably agree that this is unacceptable.  If people were utilizing smartphones to cure disease while driving, and this productivity would otherwise be lost, we may decide that the added risk of car accidents is justified.

Thoughts? Criticisms?

I may not realize my errors in reasoning without feedback.