It seems that academia is in league with the legal profession and the growing army of largely pointless psychologists and ‘counselors’ who treat the myriad of syndromes which we are told plague society.
Blackberry email devices can be so addictive that owners may need to be weaned off them with treatment similar to that given to drug users, experts warned today. They said the palmtop gadgets, which have been nicknamed ‘crackberries’ because users quickly become hooked on them, could be seriously damaging to mental health.
…and what is quite literally the ‘money quote’…
[She] added: ‘Employers provide programmes to help workers with chemical or substance addictions. ‘Addiction to technology can be equally damaging to a worker’s mental health’.
It is not hard to see where this is going. Owning a Blackberry can be pathologised into ‘Information and Communication technology (ICT) addition’ and clearly any company not providing professional help for ICT addiction could well be negligent (i.e liable to be sued) for ignoring work related harm caused to employees.
Academics love pathologising things as that leads to grants for ‘further study’, psychologists love it because they can make a fortune as ‘counselors’ treating the afflicted, lawyers love it when academics pathologise something as that means a company can be sued for causing someone to ‘catch’ a ‘recognised syndrome’, and of course politicians love it because that means clearly there is something here that must be regulated and perhaps even taxed more to discourage it.
But what is the solution if your Blackberry is messing with your mind? Turn the fucking thing off when you go home. Sorted. My bill for your therapy session is in the post.
From seeing hundreds of Blackberry “addicts” over the last couple of years, it’s safe to say that the same people who are “addicted” to the thing are the same as people in past years who couldn’t put down a cell phone, or who couldn’t put their pagers on vibrate, who would sit somewhere for hours with a landline phone stuck to their ears, or who would have their assistants keep a sharp eye on the ticker tape…
Don’t be silly, Perry. Your cure involves folks taking *gasp!* personal responsibility for their lives.
Obviously, you’re a quack. Best leave it to the experts, mate.
Keith, Don’t say “personal responsibility” out loud!
You’ll make a Liberal’s ears bleed…
As I type this on my PC, seated in front of my twin 21″ Trinitrons, my mobile and Skype phone are on the desk, my laptop is whirring in the background and in the same room there are also two PCs in various stages of completion and my girlfriend’s machine which is busily formatting its new Maxtor…
I got it bad…
Except this is the sort of thing I do for a living. Some might call it an addiction. I prefer to call it work. You might as well say that truckers have an addiction to being in control of large diesel engined vehicles.
I assume to avoid any taint of hypocrisy the learned academicians who producedd this report did so with stylus and wax tablet.
Turn the fucking thing off when you go home.
A year or so back my girlfriend was working as a PA to a partner at KPMG in Manchester. The company had given him a Blackberry months back. He was rather old-school and had never even taken it out of the box. That solution seemed to work for him.
Having said that there is much to be said against such technophobia. He insisted that all his emails be printed before he read them and my girlfriend never tires of telling the tale of the epiphany her boss had when she showed him that Excel could actually automatically sum columns. Hitherto he’d thought his underlings were adding them up with pocket calculators…
Marvelous. Cynical, and realistic about how things really work, instead of the cloying sweetness of the “oh, poor baby” touchy-huggy crowd.
But you stop too soon.
When the Blackberry makers and users who disagree with this nonsense attempt to state their case, they will be disqualified because they are interested parties, as opposed to the selfless therapists and concerned political types.
In fact, the fallacy of the disinterested, usually non-profit, purely academic advocate, who is only searching for truth and trying to help the rest of us poor, brainwashed consumers, ignores the entire range of shadow “industries” who feed off any productive innovation.
Composed of the very academics, lawyers, therapists, politicians, lobbyists, activists, and advocates you cite, they are part of a burgeoning class of parasites whose only function is to demonize perfectly normal human activity, research illusory “damage’ caused by a never ending list of vague and nebulous causes, and engage in lawsuits and other legal actions, including lobbying for complex regulations, from which they derive a very good living as a burden on those who simply wish to go about their life.
One of the primary reasons for the cancerous growth of the state, and its relentlessly intrusive reach into every possible area of society, is the myriad of “activists”, grant-funded researchers, victimologists, and compassionate, concerned political types who demand that the government become involved in an endless list of crises.
The end result is the current situation, in which there is no single area of human conduct or social activity which is not regulated, overseen, or restricted by the power of the state.
There are addictions involved in this scenario, certainly, but any alleged addiction to a minor electronic device is a dandelion in a field of poison ivy.
As Perry so correctly points out, find out whose pockets are being stuffed with money from grants, legal settlements, and fees for therapy, and whose egos are being stroked by acquiring more and more political power over their fellow citizens—there are the true addicts.
It’s time to go cold turkey.
Well you have to blame Uncle Sigmund, his never ending line of nervous women and the old Peruvian marching powder for all this dont you.
He was flat wrong then, as is provable now. But no-one listens.
The whole, we’ve got the answer to all your problems, brigade, be it mental and spiritual health to dieting, are doing a roaring trade.
A friend of mine is a “New Age” therapist down in Glastonbury (yeah well where else!) and he is coining it in! We have known each other since school, and he knows I dont believe a word of his “Therapies” but we’re still good friends. Ha and when the poor sods who stump up the cash for his house being wired like Cape Kennedy, with the very latest digital equipment, go home, we pop off down the pub and have a great big laugh.
What tripe!
I hate my blackberry with a passion surpassed only by the horror of shopping for wallpaper.
I have yet to meet anyone who likes that freakin’ anchor.
They can find you anywhere. 9 out of 10 messages are for someone else and I got CC’d. Mine is on while I am at work and when I’m on call. Otherwise it sits under a pile of towels so I don’t get notified by its stupid warble.
When they really want me, they can call me on my cell. Those psycho types wouldn’t get a dime from me.
Well, RAB, I undrstand what you are getting at with old Sigmund, but it’s even more than that.
There is a concerted effort to assert a claim that everything and everyone is fragile.
Children are fragile, women are fragile, men are fragile (but won’t admit it), nature is fragile, the earth is fragile, the oceans are fragile, the weather is fragile, the climate is fragile, society is fragile, all non-caucasian cultures are fragile (and therefore can’t be criticized or morally evaluated), emotions are fragile, hope is fragile, and on and on and on….
What does all this mean? That everything, and everyone, needs to be protected, nurtured, shielded from the rigors of an uncaring and indifferent reality, spared rigorous evaluation or assessment, pampered, taken care of, nannied.
The paternalistic, and maternalistic, worldview requires that the universe and all contained in it become infantalized, a bundle of needs, weaknesses, incapacities, wounds, unmet yearnings, and, most importantly, failures.
The ideal entity is an injured baby in a damaged house in a devastated city in a collapsed society on a ruined earth. Only then can everything, and everyone, be marshalled, regimented, put under orders, and enlisted in the campaign to save this ultimate victim.
They look at you, the collectivists, the statists, the most-compassionate-ones, with those moist eyes, uncomprehending, astounded that you don’t see this terrible need, all these terrible, immediate needs, all around you crying out, demanding everything you have, everything you are or want to be.
There is a distance that is required if one decides to live their own life, making their own choices, enjoying the occasional success, dealing with the inevitable failures. It is the distance required by the belief that others should live their own lives also, should be left alone to make a go of it as best they can.
It is the distance required between adults, in a rational universe, living as rational beings.
It is time to grow up.
You are one very eloquent man
Veryretired.
Huge tip of the hat!
I would argue that pathologists should be committed to intervention and treatment for being addicted to the sound of their own voice….
The thumb up bum and mind in neutral academy never miss an opportunity to push the digit up further and spin their mental wheels aimlessly.
Therapy, a sorely abused concept, is an excuse for social rapine and charge a fee in the process. Nice work if you can get it. It’s a shame the “it” isn’t called a raspberry which would give the syndrome a better sense of its condition, that of gadgetetic dysphoria evidenced by a loud discharge of gas. Nothing a dose of Andrews won’t fix.
And the monstrous black spider nestling at the centre of these parasite industries?
Yes, the good old BBC.
Time to privatise.
veryretired@10:16 – a glorious “Uncle Jimmy” moment…and spot on.
Puttng therapists in charge of mental heath policy is like putting an arms dealer in charge of the Foreign Office.
I’d rather trust a therapsid…at least I feel some ancestral bond.
are you blind? Arms dealers are in charge of the foreign office.
See Here
Veryretired is *on fire* today! Those two comments deserve to be a post.
veryretired 12:46…WTG!!! Preach it, brother!
Part of my job is career counseling. “I want to help people.” I hear it all the time.
“Any time you provide a product or service that someone else needs, you help them. So, what product or service is really interesting to you, that you’d like to get into, that has market value?”
Not a counseling method that I was taught in graduate school, but, I believe to be far more focused and effective.
Just say no! If you can…to employer provided cell phones, pagers, crackberries, and laptops. It’s their electronic leash. They will own you 24/7.
A lady I work with is going to another city with her adult son this week, for getting surgery scheduled for his soft tissue cancer. She was telling us this at work, within earshot of the overlords, and reassuring us all that she would have her cell, crackberry, and laptop with her and she wouldn’t miss a beat.
Miss the effin’ beat! Your son has cancer! Unplug for a few days, will ya? We will survive!
Craziness.
A lot of dichotomising here. Instead of ‘its evil or its good’ I like having cake and eating it or in terms of this debate, using and not being used by technology. On second thoughts though, I guess if I was in a job where the employers insisted on chaining us to them I wouldnt be so smug.