What could be one of the reactions to the attempted terrorist bombing on a Northwest Airlines on Christmas Day? One reaction could be the banning of the in-flight use of electronic devices on international flights arriving in the US, according to some news sites and blogs.

Horror of horrors if we cannot work or entertain ourselves while en route. Productivity will plummet! We may arrive totally unprepared at meetings! We may have to start writing and reading the old fashioned way! We may have to look at the cloud cover and daydream. We may even have to talk to the nobody beside us in an attempt to stave off boredom.

The speculation arose after Gizmodo (the gadget guide) posted what it said was a leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security, in which the Transportation Security Administration suggested that airlines should require travellers to "disable aircraft-integrated passenger communications systems and services (phone, Internet access services, live television programming, global positioning systems) prior to boarding and during all phases of flight".

The Wall Street Journal reports that some passengers are already experiencing the new rules, even though they have not been put into operation and they bear no relation to the attempted attack on Christmas day, which involved explosives hidden in the suspect's underwear.

One person confirmed via Twitter that she and her children could not use their laptops during a flight from Montreal to Chicago. "So no Kindle, no laptop on int'l flights into US. My kids slept and read a good book. I worked on my book-with a pen & paper," she tweeted.

Sounds like a nice family time to me. Of course, I am being sarcastic. It would be a great inconvenience to not be able to use electronic devices while travelling by air. Travel time is one of the best ways to shut out the world and get on with things you always wanted to do but were too busy or tired to get to right away.

I would only be supportive of such a ban if an airline regulator were able to show that electronic devices could be used to blow up a plane. There is enough scanning technology out there to ensure on board technology is safe, or so I have been told by security experts working in the aviation sector.

Let us hope calmer heads will prevail and a solution will be found. In the case of the Christmas attack it looks now as if this was an old-fashioned bureaucratic failure (not listing the attacker on the no-entry list) coupled with poor security procedures in Nigeria or Amsterdam. It was not a case of someone using an iPod or laptop as a device to bring down a plane.

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A 'Talk of the Town' piece in a recent New Yorker article points out how we become 'inattentionally blind' while using our devices. I have called this period the 'distracted age' and this labelling is confirmed by a Western Washington University study cited by the magazine to explain a recent air incident in which two Northwest pilots overshot Minneapolis by 150 miles. They were apparently oblivious to radio calls from air-traffic control because they were using their laptop computers to discuss scheduling procedures.

The university study, released about the same time as the incident, described an experiment in which three out of four test subjects who were walking while talking on their cell phones failed to see a clown on a unicycle pedalling through the campus.

Inattentional blindness is caused by an inability to multi-task well, a fault my girlfriend is never tired of accusing me of having in abundance. The study has a point: many of us multitask while driving: changing radio channels, listening to a voice version of a book, talking by phone, and even texting. Some studies even claim that talking with another person in the car may be lethal.

I admit, I have done all of the above before. When I was 25 I once swung my car into a scrape with a wall because I braked too hard. I was so engrossed in a voice version of a crime novel that I noticed too late that the cars ahead of me were stopping very quickly due to a problem ahead.

I did not do any damage to anyone or myself and so was lucky. I learnt a valuable lesson for very little cost. Cars seem like safe pods in which one may get comfortable and distract oneself from the task of conducting a potentially deadly weapon down a narrow corridor.

Having a young child in the car has made me even more aware of the dangers; especially of getting distracted by him. All this to say, for the coming year let us make a resolution to make no exceptions about the use of gadgets while driving. Just that one time can lead to a lot of hurt.

This sounds like a weird way of a column on technology to end the year. Really, it is my way of saying have a safe and happy 2010.

Send any comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmedgmail.com