Mobile e-mail gadgets: “Bad for relationships, bad for work and bad for the soul” [Tom Gross]
E-mail, it seems, is the scourge (and blessing) of our age.
Nice article from my friend Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian on BlackBerrys:
The first casualty is home life. The BlackBerry user is never really at home. He may be in the room, but his mind is at work.
… Nor, strangely enough, is portable email much good for your work. BlackBerrys encourage the instant, brief response, when often a longer, more considered answer is required.
… Above all, these machines are bad for your soul. I came to that admittedly extreme conclusion on a recent night at the theatre. At the end of each scene, a double glow appeared from the row in front: a couple were checking their BlackBerrys. No matter what emotional depths were plumbed on stage, these two could not be reached. The gadget was a barrier to their hearts.
Users boast that once you have a BlackBerry no time is dead time. Ten minutes waiting for a train are no longer lost, but used to plough through the email backlog. I asked one Crackberry head how he would spend those minutes in the past, before he was hooked. “Watching the crowd go by,” he said, wistfully.
… Yet now we are living in what the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls the “age of interruption”, in which we “interrupt each other or ourselves with instant messages, email, spam or cellphone rings. Who can think or write or innovate under such conditions?”
... The line you almost never hear is “my employer makes me carry this thing”. The truth is, we’re doing it to ourselves and this is surely the BlackBerry’s most pernicious feature.
08/23 04:44 AM
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