Bieber silences youth - Don't text while driving

Justin Bieber and PhoneGuard, Inc. Join "Remember Alex Brown Foundation" To Launch a Campaign To Encourage Responsible Texting

This one's right up my alley in the roiling confluence of Bieberwatch and PR stunts. Our boy hero is teaming up with a company called PhoneGuard to preach safe phone habits and memorialize a young lady who died while texting on the road:

"As a 17-year-old driver, I am aware of the countless distractions that we teenagers face on the road, and texting is one that is preventable. There are too many young people, like Alex Brown, whom we've lost because of texting while driving, and it is my hope that, through this partnership with PhoneGuard, we will raise awareness of this issue and create safer conditions for everyone on the road."

But this isn't just another celebrity-endorsed "don't text while driving" campaign. I'm fine with those; I think it's important to educate teens about the dangers of texting on the road, especially since it's inevitably going to kill me. (Not as quickly as it'll kill my friend Sherman. He confessed the other day that he once replied to a text while riding his motorcycle on the freeway. He even had to take his gloves off first.) But this time, it's not just about education. This is much more ominous:

"PhoneGuard's revolutionary Drive Safe™ anti-texting while driving software application suite disables the texting, e-mailing, and keyboard functions of a mobile phone in a vehicle that is in motion."

Clearly, Bieber believes that education has failed, and America's teenagers are so reckless and untrainable that we have to gag them in the name of safety. A better headline: "Bieber silences youth with anti-expression shackles!" I may not agree with the practice of texting while driving, but I'd die for every American's constitutional right to do it. Probably soon.

Oddly, PhoneGuard CEO Scott Frohman seems to imply that Bieber helped design the software: "Justin has played a key role in developing the program and his extraordinary reach will make him instrumental in promoting it," says Frohman. Did Bieber do a little coding on the back end? I e-mailed the people at PhoneGuard asking them to clarify that statement, but they wisely ignored me.

Source: The Phoenix

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