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A road safety ad from South Africa has resurfaced and gone viral on YouTube after luring you in with a funny stream of clips, before a terrifying point is made at the end.
It starts out looking innocent enough – clips of people walking and texting on their phones bump into people and object while completely distracted.
One smashes her phone across the road after bumping into a fellow pedestrian. Another trips and falls into a pond. Others walk straight into poles, doors, and bus shelters because they’re too engrossed in their phones to pay attention to their surroundings. It’s hard to not laugh at these people making fools of themselves.
The message ‘you can’t even text and walk’ pops up on the screen, and then suddenly we’re in a car with a driver, who is looking down at a phone, at the second she is involved in a horrible collision which causes the car to roll leaving the woman dangling upside down from her seat. It’s graphic, and a stark contrast to goofy opening scenes.
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A final message asks why, then, do we text and drive?
As part of the #itcanwait campaign, the video makes an important message about the dangers of texting while driving. Since 2009 mobile phone users have been texting more than calling,
It may seem a trivial thing to glance down at the phone while driving, to check your map or to see who just messaged. Some would consider it simply multi-tasking. But as the creators of the #itcanwait campaign explain, ‘the concept of multi-tasking is a dangerous myth.’
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‘As the National Safety Council points out, brain activity in the areas that process moving images decreases by over 33% when we are talking on our phone. This means that we effectively become partially blind when we use our cell-phone while driving.
‘There is no call, and certainly no text message, so important that it is worth a human life: it can wait.’
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