Do you know what vlogging while driving is? I admit I didn’t, until I received an email from Abby Keefe from Erie Insurance. Vlogging while driving is a relatively new trend that involves popular social media influencers talking to a camera mounted on their dashboards to create videos for their followers. While the behavior may seem safe because it’s hands-free, an internationally recognized expert on distracted driving says it’s anything but.

“The research is absolutely clear. Hands-free is not safe,” said Paul Atchley, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, who has been studying distracted driving for more than 20 years. “It’s your brain that’s the problem, not touching a phone. And we know when your brain is engaged by a phone call — even a hands-free one — the risk for a car crash increases.”

Erie Insurance showed Atchley several videos gaining buzz online showing influencers looking back and forth between their camera and the road, fiddling with the camera on their dashboard, and in one case, almost swerving off the road. “As a car insurer that wants everyone on the roads to be safe, Erie Insurance keeps on top of the latest driving trends. This one is particularly troubling because the people doing it probably think it’s safe since it’s hands-free,” said Jon Bloom, vice president of personal auto, Erie Insurance. “We reached out to Dr. Atchley to shed light on what’s going on in the brain that makes this behavior actually much more dangerous than people realize.”

The answer, says Atchley, is that multi-tasking is a myth. People can switch back and forth between tasks but can truly only do one thing at a time.

To see how vlogging while driving, even with a mounted camera, is distracting, it’s important to understand the meaning of the term. A distraction is something that’s not related to the primary task. If the primary task is driving, then creating a social media video is a distraction. There are three categories of distractions: manual, visual and cognitive. In the case of videotaping oneself while driving, the manual distraction is taking hands off the wheel, the visual is looking at the camera instead of the road, and the cognitive distraction is “performing” for the camera instead of focusing on driving.

“I hope that social media influencers who vlog while driving realize that they are influencing a portion of the population that is more likely to die in a car crash than the next three causes of death combined,” said Atchley. “So not only are they demonstrating bad behavior, but they’re also demonstrating it to a group of individuals who already are at high risk.”

Since this vlogging thing is new to me I Googled “vlogging while driving” and watched a video of a young female driver doing the vlogging thing and it was very enlightening.

In the video I watched, the girl driving can be seen taking her eyes off the road almost 20 times within the first 20 seconds of her video, “vlogging while driving is not illegal. I even have both hands on the wheel,” she justified at the beginning of her over six-minute video, filmed entirely in motion. Despite her hands on the wheel safety disclaimer, at some points in the video she does remove at least one hand entirely from the wheel, like when she films her cat which is sitting directly on her lap. She also holds her phone/camera in her hand while she drives.

Vlogging while driving per se may not be illegal, but it certainly exhibits dangerous distracted driving. No responsible safe driver would ever think of vlogging while driving. I hope you don’t, either.