Monday 4 February 2008

'BlackBerry Blackouts' Urged for Work/Life Balance

Sometimes, with all these new technologies vying for my attention I feel swamped on what to spend my time on; FaceBook, Emails, Social Networking sites, VLEs, RSS readers, SMS messages etc. To keep up, what should I do? I can't abandon any but am increasingly spending more of my spare time trying to give each it's due share of my time. A day without visiting these sites or applications I feel a strong urge to find an Internet connection. Am I becoming addicted? Several words have been coined to describe the phenomenon of addiction to certain technologies - crackberry is one, which describes emailing using mobile devices (like the BlackBerry) as being addictive as the narcotic crack. It wont be long that like the Canadian Government (see link below), a directive is issued from our institutions and employers for people to simply just - take it easy.

Should we be then encouraging and expecting our students and staff to be soaking up all these technologies, only for them to become evermore disorientated and addicted. Shouldn't we be investigating the effects of addiction, and perhaps prepare ourselves as an institution (student services or HR) for counselling for addiction to technologies? Should some of our Pathfinder budget (or any future grants) be allocated to such causes?

Does anyone feel the way I do or not?

Mohamed

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It may be wishful thinking, but a Canadian government ministry has sent out a directive to its employees urging them to relax and not to use their BlackBerry smartphones at night or on weekends and holidays.

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1 comment:

Steve Mackenzie said...

Great Post Mohamed. I think you have a very good point about information overload and the potential need for counselling