Blackberry Buzz

As a suitable finale of yet another incredibly sunny weekend of the local Indian Summer, my friend and I were walking down on 8th Avenue to an allegedly “veeery good” French restaurant Sunday evening. Having had a rather early brunch, by 6 pm I was impatiently craving a well-prepared bowl of soup and some authentic, moldy Roquefort cheese (just to mention two from my long list of gastro hard-to-finds). When we were still looking for the place around 6.30 with a grumbling stomach, I got a little edgy. Then, he elegantly pulled out his BlackBerry, and it took about 1.2 seconds to Google the exact location of “Tout Va Bien” that happened to be one block down the street. Normally my way of finding a restaurant would be to ask someone for directions, but given the massive number of eating-out places around Hell’s Kitchen (i.e. Midtown West), this time his supermodern solution was probably more efficient and undoubtedly more stylish.
As with every new digi-device that is thrown on the market today, at first I was skeptical and completely ignorant about these handy little BlackBerry phones. But in no time, I had to realize that it is spreading more rapidly than any other smart digital device in corporate America.
When it made its debut in 1999, it was a status symbol of CEOs. Then, it reached lower and lower levels of the corporate ladder every year, chaining more and more unsuspecting employees to their virtual work desks. Today, my boss, my gym instructor and my friend next door have the same models – along with about 11 million other wireless devotees from Utah to Ukraine.
The beauty of this wonderful new gadget is that you can browse from your phone without wireless connection, you can Google your destination on your way, you respond to emails on the subway and since “your desk goes with you everywhere you go,” infamously long American work hours are now unofficially stretched out to a full day. You are virtually never off the hook.
As a keen devotee of Thomas Friedman’s notion of the “Flattening World,” I am utterly amazed by how these new American "digital steroids" and "ubersteroids" can facilitate the push and pull of information and tear down barriers of communication. But I am not sure I was very thrilled to have my tasty entrée interrupted three times by real-time emails that could probably have waited until we finished the dessert.