Phone zombie

A phone zombie is a regular pedestrian turned zombie walker because they’re busy staring at their phone.

Sometimes it’s hard not to be a phone zombie—whether it’s a notification about where you’re about to meet, a message about something you just finished at work, texting to say you’re on your way home, a sudden thought to look something up, reading a weekly newsletter, or maybe it’s just switching the podcast. On a long, quiet street on my commute, I’ve also read a book while walking. There are so many reasons why it’s easy to turn into a phone zombie walking unthinkingly down the street.

Once, while waiting for a crossing light to change and checking train times on my phone, I noticed the people around me starting to cross. Taking my cue, I began to walk too, only realising a few steps later, with a car bearing down on me, that the light hadn’t changed to signal it was ok to cross. I’ve also seen people walk into cyclists, a near miss with a bus driving close to the curb, and someone tripping and falling. Take care, and don’t let it be you!

In a lovely BBC radio episode on skeumorphs, novelist Will Self described what he calls the zombie walk:

"You see people doing what I call the zombie walk, which is reading their phone, particularly when it's dark, and you see the uplight on their slightly vacant faces as they stumble through the environment. Because they're no longer really aware of the environment around them; they're semi-virtual at that point."

Phone zombies are also known as smartphone zombies, smombie for short, or zombie pedestrians.

Phone Zombie Prints

You can get a printed gift of phone zombies , but as zombies aren't that nice to look at, I also made a friendlier version of phone zombies .

Related Ideas to Phone Zombie

Also see:

• Continuous partial attention
• When drinking tea
• Phubbing: snubbing people for your phone
• Halfalogue: hearing half a phone conversation