I don't really know what else to call it other than what I did in the title but in a place that is as densely populated as Da Nang I feel as though it is pretty important to be aware of your surroundings. As someone who was recently injured badly by someone that wasn't paying close attention to their surroundings and ended up crashing into me on my bicycle, this is something that I take quite personally when I see it and yesterday I had to shout and was getting ready to do some sort of flying dropkick in order to punish the guy on a motorbike who was looking at his phone while driving and nearly ran into me and my dog when we were on a walk.
We were not in the middle of the road either, we were over on the side. We DO have sidewalks in Vietnam but you can't use them because all of these areas end up getting taken over and used as motorbike parking lots. I haven't been to a lot of place in this country but the few places I have been like Hoi An, Hue, Saigon, and Hanoi, they are all like this as well. The crazy and busy streets wouldn't be so bad if everyone was "keeping their head on a swivel" but far too frequently people have got their faces in their phones even when they are driving or walking somewhere.
I have heard this phenomenon referred to as "phone zombies" and then I saw this wonderful image and many other like it. I don't mean to be a "get off my lawn" older guy but shit wasn't like this when I was younger because unless you were walking while reading a newspaper you didn't really have anything to do while walking or driving that would occupy your eyes.
I am sure that it isn't lawful for people to be operating a motorbike while interacting with their phones but people do that here, often. The guy that nearly struck me and Nadi while we were on a walk yesterday, he could have easily stopped his bike for a few seconds to do whatever he was doing but nah, busy busy busy I guess! I think it would be even more dangerous on a motorbike than in a car because the motorbike requires your active involvement simply to stay upright.
When I shouted at the guy who was at that point about 10 feet from us and completely unaware of his surroundings I spooked him and he swerved to avoid hitting us but I really think that had I not shouted that I would have needed to grab Nadi and dive out of the way to avoid him hitting us. He looked back at me in an angry sort of way like "why are you shouting at me?" I let it go because I don't want to fight someone over something like this and am not a violent person in a general sense, but I will turn into a completely different animal if someone seems like they are threatening the life of my dog.
It isn't just phone zombies though, we also have the sidewalk hogs as well.
In the very rare instance that you encounter a usable sidewalk in Da Nang or elsewhere in Vietnam you also end up encountering these groups of people, normally families, that line up side to side like this is a game of rugby or something. Often in these situations I know they can see me, they know have to know that they are being really selfish about taking up the entire width of the footpath, but they just don't seem to care. This has happened for so long that these days I just stop and stare straight ahead and make them "break the line" and move around me.
I just don't understand this level of ineptitude or lack of concern for anyone else in the world other than the people in my little group be it my family or friends. I know that when I am around my own family we do actually try to not be a pain in the ass to those we are around but honestly, is all decorum just gone these days? Are we as a society really this selfish?
Another issue we've got that is a relatively new phenomenon is the content creators who do so in public. They wander around the town sometimes with a selfie stick and it is always pointed at them and they just walk around with reckless abandon and aren't even taking care to notice their surroundings. I regularly see people walking around looking like lunatics who are talking to a phone and narrating, all the while getting in the way of traffic and other pedestrians. There has also been a time that I was walking my dog and accidentally got in the middle of a shot that someone was doing. I didn't even notice it but if I did beforehand I still would have tried to accommodate this person even though I think that what they are doing is stupid. In this case the streamer or whatever they are called kind of tried telling me off but I didn't say anything to them at all just stared at them for a minute and rolled my eyes and walked away. What I wanted to do is grab their phone off of the tripod that I didn't see initially and throw it into the nearby ocean.
When I watch YouTube videos of what is going on in the USA I see that people start to record literally anything that is going on and people will often use the phone as some sort of leverage kind of like if you don't do what they want them to do they are going to use that footage against you in court or try to embarrass you online or something.