"Someone say Crack Berry?"
Posted on 08/28/2006 1:55:22 PM PDT by freemarket_kenshepherd
Perhaps it’s a symptom of a strong economy and a high standard of living, but often the media find negative angles to technology that makes our lives, and our work, easier.
That’s the spin ABC’s “World News with Charles Gibson” recently gave about the BlackBerry, the portable email devices made by Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM). The segment likened the little devices to “alcohol, drugs and gambling” in their power to “disconnect” people from other people. But missing from correspondent Dan Harris’s August 23 report: more than three-fourths of the device’s users say the e-mail device has improved the way they balance work and leisure.
“Finally tonight, the downside of keeping in touch,” anchor Gibson teased the last story for the August 23 newscast. Warning that “these kinds of devices can become electronic leashes,” he introduced a story by Dan Harris on how “for many people, the habit has become an addiction.”
Harris began with a story on a hotel manager from Chicago who would check his BlackBerry while brushing his teeth or having dinner with his wife. While “BlackBerry addiction is often ridiculed,” “there are some experts who believe that the possibility of getting addicted to communications technology is real, and really dangerous,” Harris warned before featuring “Dr. Bryan Robinson, who treats people with technology addiction.”
Robinson cautioned that some people “may actually need counseling or a 12-step program such as Workaholics Anonymous.”
While some BlackBerry users might need counseling to alleviate stress or anxiety, Harris didn’t find anyone to argue that obsessive BlackBerry use is a symptom of being a “workaholic,” not a cause thereof. Indeed, Harris set out to show the e-mail device as a bemusing nuisance to its users.
“Do you resent your BlackBerry?” Harris asked a man on the street.
“Every day. Every day,” he replied as Harris laughed.
But that opinion is in the minority, according to a study released August 24 by executive recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International (NYSE: KFY). On August 25, Reuters picked up on the recent survey which found that “more than three-quarters, or 77 percent of respondents, said they believe mobile communication devices primarily enhance their work/life balance rather than impede it.”
“It has helped me manage things without being [at] the office all the time,” Jim Craig, a New York corporate spokesman, told Reuters.
Luddites have always been around and always will be.
A blackberry is only a portable email device? I thought it was something more.
"Someone say Crack Berry?"
My next door neighbor has one of these. He was over at the house the other day and I swear he checked it 15 times in 30 minutes. When I asked him about it he said "I can't help it. Can I have another beer?"
LOL!
He was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the title, too. :)
Bravo!
I have a cell phone. Very few people have the number. And many times when I go out somewhere for fun (like skiing, riding my motorcycle, etc), it doesn't go with me. But maybe that's just me.
I use the Blacberry-work related.
It is very convenient when traveling.
Other than that it sits on my counter, in the charger powered down.
I have one for work and I hate it. Constant interruption at work and away from it. I argued against getting one, but it was mandatory.
Yes...it can occasionally present problems, but getting baseball scores whenever is worth it.
Aren't you glad he's not a compulsive m@$terb@tor!!
Heh heh heh - he said crackberry.
Didn't they shun the electric typewriter and the internet too?
Especially in the media, where most reporters have degrees in English, Journalism or other soft skills. Since the demise of the required core curriculum 30 years ago, most college grads function on about the level of 1940-50 high school grads. Basically, a BA or BS in liberal arts is what a high school diploma used to be.
Except, in the maths and sciences, it's not even that. It's quite possible to have a BA from an Ivy League school without having had more than a grade school science education, or math beyond jr. high algebra.
These reporters can't understand science and technology, so their opinions are formed from popular entertainments (mostly made by college dropouts), where all technology is threatening and all scientists are megalomaniacs bent on world domination (if not nihilists bent on planetary annihilation).
While blogs and sites like FR have gone a long way to expose the degree of ignorance, bias, and outright fakery in political and international news, they're still getting away with these hatchet jobs on technology.
The world is a better, safer, healthier, more prosperous and in many ways freer place, all things considered, than it was when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s. Only the music has deteriorated. But you'll never learn any of those things from the papers or networks. They are pimping misery, andthey are doing it because they are lazy and ignorant.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
English isn't a soft skill!
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you. While it is vital, it is only a baseline skill and a tiny subset of an "education."
Let us also remember that the BA in English today means you've read, and written politically-correct commentart on, a body of meritless documents written by people who are exalted for their membership in various identity groups.
Most of them can't write. And I'm speaking of Yale and Princeton and Harvard grads. Try one from UMass some time. "Your essay makes no sense. What is the thesis?" "Uh...huh?"
Still in all, the English grads are at least functioning, more or less, on a mid-century high school level. I bet you could get a room of education majors together to take a sixth grade science test -- as much as today's science curriculum is dumbed down -- and you'd get a 10% pass rate, offset by 10% that didn't put their own names in the proper block on the answer sheet.
The reason that humans have an involuntary nervous system providing control of pulse and respiration is simple: some of us are destined to be teachers, and if they had to think to breathe it'd be all over.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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