Love Thy Blackberry, Love Thy Kids

By NANCY GIBBS

I've been thinking a lot lately about my relationship with my gizmos. The little ones, not the adult systems all grown up and trailing wires everywhere, the big-screen TVs and stereos and desktops. I'm talking about the cell phones and pagers and Treos and BlackBerrys, with which we are much more intimate. We carry them everywhere, so that any time they twitch we feel it on our hip. Because they have no wires, they depend on us to feed them their juice every other night or so.

I first realized I was reliving the days of my daughters' infancy--the nights of light sleep, alert to every stirring--when I began plugging my gizmo into the outlet next to the bed, so it could rest beside me, generally peaceful but pinging quietly every so often when an e-mail came in. And if I was between REM cycles and heard it, I had the choice: Do I ignore it, make it sleep through the night? Or do I find out what it's trying to tell me? When my husband and I spent a weekend away, unplugged, unpinged, it felt a little like that first time we left the baby with her grandmother so we could go hiking for a whole day.

I recently dropped my gizmo down the stairs. This was an unhappy event. It survived, but with a fat, thumb-shaped dead zone on the screen, a reminder of my negligence every time I can't read the end of an e-mail. It's like that tiny scar on your little girl's cheek where the swing hit her because you turned away for a second. There must be some natural law, that the smaller something is, the more emotional space it takes up, the more time and energy it absorbs.

This temptation to obsession is the new frontier of behavioral science. Where and how we use our devices define our species and sensibility. A whole new school of Edith Wharton etiquette arises. It's O.K. for your boss to check his BlackBerry at lunch, because he's a Very Important Person, but God help you if you get caught even glancing down when yours pings. When college students meet for coffee, their cell phones are out on the table, windows facing up. Among the most e-mailed stories in the New York Times a couple of weeks back was one about the perfect vigilante weapon for the modern age: the cell-phone jammer, which silences signals within 30 feet. It's illegal and surely irresistible for commuters who still prefer to read objects with pages, undisturbed by the conference calls of their fellow travelers.

As with most things involving chips and screens, we realize how much more naturally our kids play with our toys. Their thumbs are more agile; their eyes can read the print. This is alarming for adults in all kinds of ways: kids suddenly want the same toys we have, which they understand better and use in ways we can't imagine. Parents once stayed up late on Christmas Eve assembling train sets. Now our children program our gadgets for us, surreptitiously switch our ring tones, leave notes on the screens. It's a dramatic reckoning with the inevitable transfer of power that occurs as children get older. It's their world now: we're just surfing through it.

And wait till the next generation: LG makes a phone with a breathalyzer built in. Sprint and Nextel have introduced Sprint Family Locator, kind of like LoJack for your kids. Several companies are trying out scented phones, while Nokia dreams of developing one with smell sensors. Samsung is at work with South Korean scientists on cell phones, according to the Korea Times, "that can feel, think, evolve and reproduce" and have "artificial chromosomes," all of which suggests that our gadgets will eventually replace us as parents--pestering, tracking, supervising and ultimately procreating.

Just as we see small glimpses of ourselves in our offspring, it will be intriguing to see how much of our culture survives in theirs. Not just the Beatles' but obscure Rosemary Clooney songs can stretch toward immortality, thanks to iTunes. What will it mean that for $8, you can buy the complete works of Jane Austen for downloading onto your BlackBerry?

Given all the disruption, all the crowding of bosses who can track us down anywhere, anytime, the fears that our gadgets may make us ruder and dumber and more easily distracted, it's a natural temptation to abandon technology, or at least vacation from it occasionally. First-time--and best-selling--author Timothy Ferriss has become a Silicon Valley darling by pushing his low-information diet as the secret to achieving The 4-Hour Workweek, which among other things involves checking e-mail no more than twice a day. Maybe it's worth taking the test: Do our devices really make us more efficient or less so? Do they bind us--or isolate us, becoming screens against intimacy and contact, zoom lenses that let us operate from a safe distance so that we seem closer than we really are? One suspects that trying to cut back may only teach us how attached we've become, at least to our gizmos. Like our children, they are little miracles, whose workings we can't really understand, as they make our lives bigger in surprising ways and keep us from ever feeling like we're all alone.