Will the Presidency be Hampered by the Blackberry?

There is a lot of evidence that the handheld mobile gadget can definitely change how we think – especially since we are so susceptible to interruption, distraction and addiction. Of course, this is not true for all people because it will still depend on the way you use it.

Technology Dependency

All across the land – specifically, in business districts – managers everywhere recall how many important minutes of meetings they had missed; in many cubicles, workers recall the number of hours they have lost as they try to figure out just what it was that they had been working on before it was interrupted; at many power lunch areas (all across Manhattan and Malibu), patrons mourn over the relationships that had fizzled due to their habit; homes all across the country show spouses seething over this strange bedfellow; laboratories housed many scientists who spend hours upon hours studying how technology impacts thinking; commuters on train platforms wistfully recalling those days which they spent totally occupied. All of this was recalled as soon as it was announced that newly sworn-in President Obama will get to keep to his side the BlackBerry which he so loved.

Affecting Both Attention and Task Output Quality

Technology has in fact affected the manner in which people thought, interacted and decided on things ever since the caveman era. Just like in the past, things resulted in cooperative hunting. Both cognitive and social effects of this Blackberry phenomenon on all twenty one million users are probably not so beneficial. So all the while these BlackBerry fans had been cheering over the fact that President Obama gets to keep his, they also insist that it might definitely make a lot of users even more productive as well as connected with one another. Many experts who study technological phenomenon – such as calendar reminders, e-mail alerts, instant messaging and pop-up messages – will say only two things.

One, that there is a distraction overload to this as well as two, continuous partial attention. While there are a lot of virtues that may be present in a handheld, there is definitely no questioning that it will also depend on the way you use it. You might also end up focusing on a particular thought or way of thinking and thus not be able to complete things on time. That may probably be okay for some tasks which can be handled with simply half of your brain paying attention to it, but not if things will require your full attention. Of course, such a thing may be very damaging when such an interruption occurs. There was one study that had some volunteers edit the text while searching the World Wide Web at the same time they were being interrupted by a lot of news alerts.