Always on isn't always good

When exactly did I become uncomfortable sitting alone in a restaurant? Maybe that’s not the right way to say it – I don’t know that I’ve ever been 100% comfortable hanging out solo in a public place. But recently, it has become very obvious to me that I use my BlackBerry as an electronic crutch. I’ve seen a few articles about it, which I’m sure has caused me to pay more attention to it. Even so, I now realize that as soon as the person I’m having dinner with goes to the bathroom, I instinctively pull out my trusty electronic tether – my BlackBerry. I’ll see if any new e-mail has arrived, check scores on ESPN.com, respond to txts- essentially anything to avoid staring off into the distance “alone”.

Alone is a sliding scale, I suppose. You can be alone, yet not be lonely, but even being alone is hard to do. What is so wrong with sitting at a table alone, particularly when it’s for 5 minutes until someone comes back from the bathroom? Where did this come from? I started thinking back…

“It’s long distance, I have to take this”

That was a line in a recent Hitchcock movie I saw – and the contrast struck me immediately. When was the last time I said that? When was the last time I heard it? I’m lucky to have family around the world, so long distance communication has always been a part of my life. I hear about the pre-phone days of letters and think how quaint that must have been. But I have no personal knowledge of that. Even growing up, we were able to talk on the phone to grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in foreign lands. The difference, though, was we had to plan it. We had to be home, they had to be home, attention had to be paid to the length of the conversation because rates were in the dollars per minute. I even remember going into my father’s lab (office) to make calls from there to save money. It was an ordeal. Something to look forward to – “we’re going to call Hungary on Sunday!” Long distance calling was an event.

From there, I remember the start of the internet. My brother and I would see the Prodigy & Compuserve ads magazines or in stores, and beg our parents to get it. “3 months free” it screamed! What a deal! Of course, we played off the complete knowledge that it cost money after that, but it wasn’t our money, and we wanted to have it! After a while, my father relented (being the early adapter techie that he is). We bought a modem (who knew what that was at the time), installed it in the back of our computer, plugged the phone line into the computer, installed the software and listened as weird noises suddenly came screeching out. What a weird series of noises, but you got used to it. Those sounds instantly signaled you were on your way to communicating with the outside world.

Remember those days? When you had to pick between being on the phone or being on-line? Wow, that seems so long ago- especially as I sit outside connected wirelessly to my always on super-fast internet with my wireless cell phone (BlackBerry) next to me ready to connect me to any phone number.

Anyway, we had Prodigy or Compuserve (I can’t remember which) for a while, and loved it. I don’t even know what we would use it for, but it was great! I do remember having to monitor our time on it because, like long distance, there were per minute charges. My brother did a great job racking up a few hundred dollars in charges one month, but other than that, we managed to stay within the limits. I am trying to think back to what we used the on-line world for in those days, and I honestly can’t remember. It was pre digital cameras, so uploading photos is out. Reading different magazines and newspapers was one of the first things I can remember. And that was the start of the on-demand world – instead of waiting for the paper to come to you, you logged in and read it when you wanted.

E-mail quickly added to that world, with us moving over to AOL and our friends moving on-line too. But it was a different world of e-mail. You had to log in. There was something to look forward to. “Did anyone e-mail me?” – I remember the marked increases in e-mail checking in college. It went from, maybe, once a day, to multiple times a day fairly quickly. And who can forget the friendly “you’ve got mail!” AOL would greet you with when you had a message. It was always such a letdown when I heard the modem buzzing away, it logged in, and then went silent with no friendly mail greeting. Such a disappointment!

A big part of the on-line evolution was IM – the great AOL instant messaging program. Rather than e-mails that you send and wait for replies for, IMs allowed you to immediately communicate with your desired partner. That was my first sense of technology black holes – I remember hours passing by in what seemed like minutes. I would look at the clock and think, wow, I’ve been talking to this person for 3 hours!

As the dial-up world faded into the always on broadband world of the early 2000s, web usage skyrocketed. I no longer had to worry about how much time I was on-line, and as an added bonus, it was 50x faster! So not only could you forget about monitoring your on-line usage, you could accomplish a lot more because the pages loaded much faster. But accomplish might be an overstatement. You could do more stuff, but I’m not sure I ever made the connection to actually having a goal in mind. More sites were available, pictures were now everywhere, video was starting to become more popular and more people had e-mail. I was quickly getting used to being able to enhance my physical world with my on-line world. But there was still a conscious effort required on my part to “check” my e-mail.

I worked in marketing & promotions for a few years after college, and during that time, I resisted the BlackBerry explosion. I didn’t see the need. I actually liked not having my e-mail follow me around. (Ironic, considering I am a giant tech geek like my dad with new gadgets.) A BlackBerry and iPod were 2 things I resisted for a long time.

When I moved into sales, the foundation began to crumble. The need to know if a client had an urgent question, or if I even needed to head back to the office after a 3pm meeting were justification enough. I accepted my father’s offer of using the remaining 6 months on his T-Mobile Sidekick contract since he upgraded to another device. Looking back, it really was my gateway drug into the always on world. 6 months of free service were long enough to convince me that I needed to have this. There were deals I closed because I got back to clients a lot faster than I would have if I only had e-mail at the office.

I don’t even think I made it to end of the 6 months before heading to the Verizon Wireless store for my first BlackBerry. (That sounds so quaint doesn’t it? Like that whole Sony campaign a while back “My First Sony”.) It was a solid machine. E-mail showed up instantly, sometimes before it got to Outlook on my actual computer (which I always got a kick out of), and once I started exploring the new mobile websites that were exploding, I was hooked. Plus, BlackBerry does an amazing job of integrating your contacts into one place. When you want to contact Chris, it asks you- do you want to call or txt him? At which number? If you want to e-mail him, at work or personal? It was an amazing device. I quickly shifted my thinking to “how did I survive this long without this?”

Of course I now did because I didn’t know what I was missing before. Ignorance is bliss, and when you don’t know what you don’t know- there’s something liberating about that. But now that I knew it existed, I loved it! My first BlackBerry gave way to my second within a year as they came out with a slimmer model that worked all around the world. My friend Andi was the lucky recipient of my old BB, and she got equally hooked.

So now we come to the present… a place where I can’t wait 3 seconds after stopping at a red light before instinctively glancing down to my BB to see if the blinking light has gone from green to red (indicating a new message has arrived). A place where before I embark on a drive, I scroll through my mental rolodex of who I can call- a complex system factoring in time zones, length of time since I’ve last talked to people, who has Verizon (so it’s a free call), etc. Luckily my brain has grown accustomed to computing these self-imposed algorithms rather easily, so I’m usually hitting “send” and commencing a call 20 seconds after I turn the car on.

And some of these calls are to my family in Hungary. There is no more planning needed to call halfway around the world. I just dial an access code so the call only costs a few cents per minute, and seconds later am connected. I don’t need to go to a unique location to place the call, I can do it from anywhere. I don’t have to worry if the other person is there, because if they’re not, I can just as easily call tomorrow.

Now granted, not all of this is bad. My talking while driving is equal parts related to wanting to use that valuable time to reconnect with friends. I choose to use that (especially on the way home) as time to connect with east coast people since by the time I get home most of them are in bed. But my point, overall, is more to the multi-tasking nature of it. I actually feel like something is missing if I’m not talking while driving at certain times. (Other times I love it because listening to music loudly in the car is another favorite pastime.)

This occurs in other areas of my life as well – take writing this blog for example. I made a conscious decision to take my laptop outside and type on my deck rather than write it while having the TV on in the background. There are very few things I can do with sole attention. If I’m watching a previously DVR-ed TV show, that’s ok. But if it’s live TV, I quickly grow restless and fire up the laptop to simultaneously surf the web.

Even at work, on a conference call or routine phone call, my eyes begin to wander to my computer screen and wonder if I can clear off a few e-mails while I’m listening. Not the best idea, because neither is getting my complete attention, but nonetheless, my gut feeling is I need to be doing more than just talking on the phone. It’s not healthy.

On the plus side, when I was going camping 2 weeks ago I was told my cell phone might not work at the campsite. After overcoming a momentary attack of panic, I got over it and accepted it. When we got there, turns out cell phones did work, but by then I had come to terms with being off the grid for 2 days. So I left it in the car. I checked it twice a day to see if anything urgent had come up, and wouldn’t you know it, nothing did. It was a great feeling. Sitting around the campfire, just talking, staring at the crackling flames, no BlackBerry in my pocket- it felt good.

So I’m making a conscious effort to try that more often. A big thing that keeps running through my head is something I heard a while ago – just because someone sends you an e-mail, doesn’t mean you have to respond to it immediately. Despite my electronic tether, and people being used to me responding to e-mails and txts in minutes rather than hours, doesn’t mean it has to be like that indefinitely. Every now and then, I want to be ok not glancing at it and waiting to see if the light is green or red.