According to the emerging etiquette of the online era, it’s the height of rudeness to take out your handheld device and check your emails while friends or colleagues are talking. But what if they’ve been talking for seven hours?
“If you’re a new MP, and you want to make a speech in a debate, you just know you’re going to get called last, so we’re not talking about waiting around in the chamber for just half an hour here,” said Jo Swinson, Liberal Democrat member for East Dunbartonshire, who at 27 is the youngest person in parliament. “And when someone’s saying over and over again what they could have said in five minutes ... well, multi-tasking really becomes very important then.”
Capitulation to the addictive power of the “crackberry” has been less straightforward in France, where state defence experts have advised government staff not to use wireless devices to send and receive email for fear that foreign spy agencies – notably the Americans – might intercept their messages. Emails sent using BlackBerrys are routed through servers in the US and Britain. “It’s not a problem if you’re writing to your mother-in-law,” the French legislator Pierre Lasbordes said. But if a minister going to a G8 meeting “sends information to his colleagues [and] it goes via Canada and the United States ... that’s it. Game over.”
Research In Motion, the Canadian company behind the BlackBerry, dismissed French fears, stressing that emails sent on its networks were more thoroughly encrypted than banking information on the internet.
The birth of the Blackberry
There was nothing in the circumstances of the BlackBerry’s birth to suggest that it might snowball, in a few years, from a prototype in a laboratory to a device with 8m subscribers worldwide. Mike Lazaridis was the son of Greek immigrants who had worked on the production line at Chrysler in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from America’s great motor city, Detroit.
He dropped out of college when General Motors speculatively gave him a contract to start a hi-tech firm, and in 1984, with a $15,000 loan from his parents, he founded Research In Motion (RIM). Now he is worth $1.7bn, making him one of the world’s richest people; he is regularly called Canada’s answer to Bill Gates.
Silver-haired Lazaridis, 46, divides his time between running the firm that created the BlackBerry and funding scientific research and educational programmes.
Things started slowly for Lazaridis: it took five years for the company to get the BlackBerry into the hands of 1m users, all of whom were based in North America. But the second million signed up in less than a year, and the company’s most recent figures show that 1m more addicts were created in the last three months. It has long since trounced its rival firm Palm, which is now worth $1.7bn to RIM’s more than $30bn. “People want to work wherever they like,” is how Charmaine Eggberry, who runs the company’s European operations, sums up the gadget’s fundamental appeal. Or, at any rate, people think that they want to work wherever they like. RIM’s well-planned marketing campaigns first targeted the American and British corporate elite, establishing the BlackBerry as a symbol of high status; employees on the next level down began to crave one, and the device began to sell itself.
Few parts of the world are immune: some of the company’s fastest-growing markets are in India, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, while in countries such as Nigeria, Kenya and Mauritius, the BlackBerry is helping some people leapfrog computer ownership altogether.
In April, when RIM’s North American networks broke down for 10 hours, one major investment bank warned that deals might fall through; other users breathed a sigh of relief.
“A patient asked me whether I thought it was abnormal that her husband brings the BlackBerry to bed and lays it next to them while they make love,” Dr Hallowell told Time magazine. The answer may seem obvious. But the BlackBerry didn’t get where it is today by respecting traditional limits.
The etiquette: When is it OK to check your BlackBerry?
In a meeting:
Realistically speaking, it probably depends on whether you're the boss. But according to one recent survey 31% of senior executives think it's never acceptable.
At a meal with family or friends:
The quickest shortcut to giving offence with your BlackBerry. Excuse yourself from the table, or have a really, really good explanation ready for why you need to check email.
In the bathroom:
Alone in a locked cubicle, the concept of etiquette doesn't really apply. Moreover, in office bathrooms almost anything, including BlackBerry use, is less unacceptable than holding a mobile phone conversation in the middle of other procedures more appropriate to the setting.
In the car:
If you’re the driver this isn't a question of etiquette - it's illegal in the UK, just the same as for mobile phones.
In the bedroom:
All too common, and hard to find offensive if whoever you share the bedroom with is doing it too. But a bad idea in terms of insomnia, and maybe relationship harmony.