A week ago, if you had ever heard of Hollywood plastic surgeon Dr. Frank Ryan, it was because last November, he spent a long ten hours surgically enhancing reality TV celebrity Heidi Montag’s body to cartoonishly pneumatic proportions.

Today, the fifty year old man is known as the guy who accidentally killed himself by driving his Jeep off a cliff while tweeting about his border collie.  That would be a tragic, inane end to any life but given the rising furor over distracted driving and people’s general uneasiness with the phenomenal rise of texting, Dr. Ryan has become a sort of posthumous posterboy for caution.

Eerily, this accident happened the same day that Mashable posted this fascinating infographic on the topic of text messaging.  Click that link and check out some of their statistics about this technology which barely existed as recently as ten years ago.  Among other eye-opening facts, it contends that the Philippines led the world in text messaging with an average of 600 messages per mobile subscriber for month in 2009.  More stunningly, the total number of SMS messages sent annually worldwide last year hovered around five trillion.  That’s 5,000,000,000,000.  To put that in layman’s terms, that’s a crapload.

We live in a time of continual distractions and constant upgrades.  What this means for long term social repercussions isn’t yet fully understood.  We’re gonna have to get an app for that.

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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