For dinner the other night, I ate too much,
and my stomach growled. Instinctively, I reached
for the BlackBerry on my belt. I thought it was
buzzing. It wasn't.
A few days later, I was waiting impatiently
for an e-mail reply from a colleague at work. I
kept gazing at the flashing light on my
electronic appendage, until I was convinced it
was flashing red to alert me to the incoming
message. But it was still green.
From cell phone to e-mail to text messages to
Internet access, my BlackBerry all but defines
my relationship to daily life. It reminds me of
a popular saying in political circles in
Washington in the early 1990s, when the Cable
News Network was omnipotent: "I have CNN.
Therefore, I am."
Thankfully, I am not a BlackBerry, at least
not yet. But I have developed a dependency on
what it does to me and for me, to the point now
that my innate human feelings and perceptions
have been hijacked by a power greater than
myself. No wonder Webster's New World College
Dictionary recognized "Crackberry" as the 2006
Word of the Year. Rarely do I go anywhere
without my driver's license, some cash in my
pocket, an ATM card and my BlackBerry. And when
I do leave it behind — even on a weekend when
I'm just running errands in the neighborhood — I
feel vulnerable, and the craving begins.
I'm not ready to label this baffling
relationship with my mobile device an addiction.
As a recovering alcoholic and addict, I know
firsthand the ravages of a true dependency on a
drug — financial ruin, fractured families,
crime, despair and death. I disdain the use of
the suffix "-aholic" to describe people who love
chocolate or shop all the time or work too much.
But there's no doubt my BlackBerry gets in
the way of my ability to focus on a sunset or
relish the sound of a cardinal singing from the
top of a tree in the springtime or hear
snowflakes falling in the forest or pay
attention to the banter of my kids. It disrupts
the routine of my workday when it delivers a
personal call or e-mail. It steals my private
time when a colleague tries to connect after my
workday ends. I cannot deny it: I have failed to
learn how to live with its ubiquitous presence
or to live without its always being turned on.
Only a dead battery offers any real respite.
The other day, my mother e-mailed me a link
(which I received via my BlackBerry) to a story
headlined "If Your Kids Are Awake, They're
Probably Online." The Kaiser Family Foundation
study finds that kids ages 8 to 18 spend more
than seven hours a day connected to some
electronic device. Even worse, because they are
multi-tasking, according to the study, they are
packing 11 hours of media content into those
seven hours. In other words, they are being
stimulated to the max.
"I'm SO glad I'm a grandparent," my mother
wrote at the top of the e-mail. And a top-notch
grandparent she is to her five grandchildren.
But after reading the story, I realized that
nobody is immune to the relentless temptations
of today's electronic world or the problems it
has caused. And if all of society, from
grandparents and parents to teachers and even
young people themselves, doesn't push back and
set boundaries, it won't be long before LSD guru
Timothy Leary's famous counterculture phrase,
"Turn on, tune in, drop out," is America's new
"E pluribus unum."
William Moyers is the vice president of
foundation relations for the Hazelden Foundation
and the author of "Broken," his best-selling
memoirs, and "A New Day, A New Life." Please
send your questions to William Moyers at
wmoyers@hazelden.org. To find out more about
William Moyers and read his past columns, visit
the Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
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