We’ve Become A Nation Of Phone Starers

Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Sunday, January 15th, 2012
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The signs are all there: Essays that insist that incessant phone staring at dinner is the wave of the future, New Yorker cartoons painfully highlighting the phone-fixated state of socialization today, the fact that I broke my toe once because I was too busy tweeting via mobile to notice a sharply angled door, blogs about clever ways to prevent phone staring at dinner and now this …

This weekend Saturday Night Live took a jab at the world’s collective phone fetish with a parody commercial for the app “Headz Up.” “Headz Up” sends realtime notifications about “what’s in front of your face” like a speeding truck, a closed elevator door or your wife.

Perhaps the saddest part about this clip is that I think (the fake) “Headz Up” actually sounds like sort of a good idea.