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Saturday, March 08, 2008
Blackberry Blues
The
modern connected worker is typified by the Starbucks coffee cup in one
hand and a Blackberry device in the other. Caffine alert and plugged-in
to the company messaging, for better or worse, our urban and urbane
worker is much parodied for their "crackberry" use. Just as Starbucks
has provided something not imagined 20 years ago (expresso-laced
Americans- or "yuppie crack"), the Blackberry fulfilled something
desired from the start of the personal computer: the pocket-sized method
of carrying the office with you. Of course this is not exactly what is
going on with the Blackberry, because it doesn't present all of what you
can execute with your PC, but leaving the office has become less
cumbersome and increasingly less likely to actually be "leaving the
office." As the SmartPhones become more capable, the office is more in
your pocket and more in your life more of the time. Above is a New
Yorker cartoon from March 3rd of this year, and here
is a poem from more than a year ago from the same magazine. It is a
reminder that technology needs to be used in a proper moderation.
