President Obama Addicted To ‘CrackBerry’!
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President Obama Addicted To 'CrackBerry'
Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie at RIM must be very pleased that the new U.S. President is fighting to hold onto their product.
While fanciful stories of terrorist plots make a nice argument, there are far more critical reasons why President Obama having a BlackBerry is a bad idea.
A major problem is that no Chief of Staff would want to risk a backdoor around him to the President.
The number of personal agendas and quantity of information in the White House is simply too great to allow for the potential of end-runs through the BlackBerry. Even if only his top people know the address, it becomes almost impossible to manage the President’s crushing workload when people are able to fire questions at Barack Obama without keeping Rahm Emanuel in the loop.
But a far graver impact of a BlackBerry could be how Obama thinks.
People often display outrageous behavior when using a BlackBerry — reading them constantly during meetings with superiors or family dinners, or jumping onto railway tracks to retrieve them without considering the consequences.
I hazard that more than one reader of this column is sitting in a meeting right now, doing the BlackBerry prayer.
Why do we do this with our berries? It may be what B.F. Skinner called “intermittent reinforcement” that makes the BlackBerry so addictive.
One of the theories around gambling addiction is that winning and the possibility of winning triggers human responses attracted to occasional positive stimulus. We don’t need to win every hand to become addicted; we just need to love the little jolt that comes when we do. The little jolt we get occasionally winning a hand of poker, eating a tub of ice cream, or receiving an email can escalate into addiction to the brain chemicals released by the stimulus.
Just like playing a slot machine, this type of “operant conditioning” makes us reach again and again for our blackberries in hope of new stimulus and the rush we feel when we get a particularly interesting email.
BlackBerry addiction is relatively harmless. It doesn’t have the financial implications of gambling or the health implications of food.
And Barack Obama won’t be able to do anything really crazy with his BlackBerry, like tape it to the steering wheel of his car.
But BlackBerry addiction and anyone fighting this hard to keep theirs probably has a pretty good case could be a major problem for the Obama agenda.
In a highly charged and information saturated environment like government, the urgent always threatens to seize the agenda from the important.
Berries exacerbate this trend by distracting decision makers from meetings, interrupting lines of thought and disassociating the individual from their surroundings.
The immediate of the next email seems to become more critical than getting the big-picture agenda right.
Constantly checking and rechecking prevents a serious and lengthy quiet contemplation of critical choices.
The ability to concentrate can even become impaired.
Barack Obama is famous for his cool, detached thinking. But does the President really need to add an additional risk to that detachment?
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Tags: A major problem is that no, Barack Obama additction, Barack Obama videos, Blackberry, chief of staff, Crackberry, Jim Balsillie, Mike Lazaridis, obama, RIM, U.S. President
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