The Crack-Berry
If you’ve ever seen me carrying my old Sony Discman around and wondered, “man, why doesn’t he just get an Ipod already?”, I’m sure you’ve heard my rant on how Ipods are ruining the state of modern music and are the epitomization of American excess (but yes, they are pretty and covenant).
In past months though, my fervor for Ipod hating has taken a clean and direct back seat to that of the Blackberry. The somewhat crude title above, is humorous, and as I had just said, crude, but somewhat accurate to boot. Blackberries (in general) become an addiction to their owners. They make the user accessible 24 hours a day 7 days a week and remove the line between career and life even more so than normal cell phones do.
Yes, it might be nice to surf the internet wherever you go, but do you need to? In my case, I’d love to have internet access on my phone, and I might look for one that does have it when my current one heads to the graveyard of past phones, but it’s the business aspect of blackberries which take it over the top for me. They turn business, and work, in to a 24 hour a day thing.
You might now be thinking, “Look at old man Josh over there, not going with technology. With his Discman and his archaic telephone, just learn to embrace technology’s changes!”
Really folks, not the case. I love exciting technology. I’m all about blogs, social networking, new cameras, new video games, tv’s, speakers, etc. In fact, I love sharper image and all their wonder! The problem though is when one of these new things dominate your life. If folks just had Ipods for listening to music, I really wouldn’t care. It’s that they go out and get new ones every two month when they come out and that they flash them as a status symbol. Same goes for Blackberries. If you have it to occasionally do work out of the office, fine. If it’s something you quietly use on the train, fine. It’s when you’re somewhere where it’s blatantly inappropriate to being doing your work that it bothers me.
I’m starting to ramble now, so I’ll sum up my point which really needs a 10+ page essay to really be made effective. Items like the Blackberry dominate one’s life in a way they shouldn’t. Life is about human connections made from one person to another, not a shoddily written email scrambled on a blackberry. Life is about more than work. I’m going to repeat this opinionated statement. Life is about more than work. We often forget this in America. Yes, having financial stability is important. Having a job is important, but it’s not the only part of life. How often when somebody asks you, “tell me about yourself” do you start with your job? It’s just the natural response for most people (myself included). Blackberries make this worse as they provide a physical and material construct to merge life and work even further.