BlackBerry Plague

By Kevin Niparko, Staff Columnist

Published on Friday, July 30, 2010

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The other day I waited in a small room at the back of the Hop — along with College President Jim Yong Kim and five other students — to greet New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg before he delivered his speech to students and community members.

You would think a small gathering of that sort would be full of excited chatter and cordial presidential-student conversation. Instead, Kim sat on a couch and read through his BlackBerry while the rest of us waited in silence.

There is a plague sweeping this nation and few people realize its existence. No, it’s not H1N1. It’s far more insidious and destructive, far more contagious and far more widespread. I’m talking about the BlackBerry Plague.

I do not question that BlackBerrys and iPhones and Google Droids have made our lives easier. Smartphones allow businessmen to receive live updates on important shipments and doctors to check up on patients, all from the palm of their hands. These devices have shrunk the world, allowing friends and family to instantly communicate — whether they live down the street or across the Atlantic Ocean.

What we must remember, though, is that while these powerful tools have succeeded in connecting us, they have also managed to disconnect us from our immediate surroundings. We have all experienced the silence and unresponsiveness of an iPhone user checking her e-mail mid-conversation, or the student in class too busy beating his high score on BrickBreaker to pay attention to the professor.

For the non-smartphone users, we have been left in the dust. We have been criticized for not responding to e-mails fast enough and have failed to receive invites to events because, “well, gosh, I don’t have your pin number and I BBMed out!” This plague has particularly affected the Dartmouth campus, where students just cannot seem to disconnect. They check their mobile blitz every time Amarna blitzes out to campus and send BBMs to people in the next dorm room.

Smartphones are certainly not evil or unnecessary tools. But I do believe that the way in which many of us have become addicted to this technology represents a real problem. Many of us cannot last even an hour without checking our blitz or Mobile Tweeting. There is even a psychological disorder known as cell phone anxiety — people afflicted with this disorder imagine that they hear their cell phones ringing or feel their pockets vibrating even when their phones are clearly sitting silently on the desk in front of them.

Perhaps New York Times columnist Bob Herbert said it best in his column, “Kiss more, Tweet Less” (July 16, 2010). In the article, he argues, “I’m not opposed to the remarkable technological advances of the past several years. I don’t want to go back to typewriters and carbon paper and yellowing clips from the newspaper morgue. I just think that we should treat technology like any other tool. We should control it, bending it to our human purposes.”

Herbert gets to the heart of the matter — it’s not the technology that is a problem, but the way we are letting it control our lives.

Experts estimate that by 2011 over 1 billion people will own smartphones. That means there will be 1 billion individuals plugged into the world wide web but disconnected from the conversations and relationships happening right before their eyes.

We’re all busy people, but not busy enough that we should disregard our immediate surroundings. We must strive to control our usage of our smart devices, instead of letting them control us — that way, we will be able to take advantage of the benefits of new technology without sacrificing our connections to the world around us.

So President Kim, and the countless other iPhone and BlackBerry owners out there, put the phone down for a minute. There’s a lot happening right in front of you that you might not want to miss out on.