By The Way: Blackberry -- If you can't be with the one you love

Sun, 01/04/2009 10:01 AM  |  Headlines

One recent evening in Bali after a day-long workshop followed by dinner, one of the participants suggested we close the day with a nightcap at the hotel's bar. About 10 of us joined in, but as far as conversations go, effectively there were only five of us.

The other five hit their flashy BlackBerrys as soon as they settled in the comfort of the cushioned sofas and ordered their drinks.

Who could blame them? This was one of those workshops where you had to leave your mobiles and other means of modern communication in your hotel room. Now was the time to check out what had been happening to our friends and around the world.

So much to catch upon -- probably dozens, if not hundreds, of emails, with some needing to be replied to immediately. And then there was Facebook, to check what your friends have been up to and to inform them what you've been doing all day.

"Hey, the rupiah went up," one of the Blackberry aficionados announced, breaking the quiet conversation that the five non-Blackberry-ans were having.

Immediately, the conversation turned to the fate of the Indonesian currency, with one or two discussing how the weak rupiah was affecting them. But the man who announced it in the first place had already returned to his handset, busily flicking through the tiny QWERTY keyboard, not listening to the conversation that he started.

Modern communication technology has changed the way we interact, but none as drastic as what BlackBerry has done to our conversations.

Mobile phones significantly reduced the amount of conversations we conduct face-to-face. We are spending more and more of our time conversing with people in far off distances and sometimes not so distant places, forgetting or ignoring those right before our eyes.

Once I saw two girls, obviously friends, boarding a bus and they were seated together. But each was busy talking over the phone throughout the bus ride, until one of them signaled by her hand that it was time to disembark. Now what was the point of traveling together, if they were not going to have a conversation between themselves? They could have gone separately for all they cared.

The worst offenders are the ones who shout through their handsets, disturbing those around them. I've seen this happened in airport lounges, restaurants and other public places. I couldn't tell whether this was just to show off (it certainly looked like it) or whether this person was simply loud. At any rate, shouldn't there be some sort of ethic in using your mobiles in public places?

Mobiles are so pass* now with the arrival of the BlackBerry and other handsets (in the name of fairness I should mention Nokia's communicator which is also popular in this country) that let you connect to the Internet wherever you are, and thus have access to your email inbox (pushed email is the worst because your handset automatically beeps each time you receive an email, including spams), and browser, messenger and Facebook.

What is so nice about BlackBerry and other sets is that you converse largely through text, and less through the use of audio-visual and therefore it is less annoying to others around you.

As in the case of our nightcap, those Blackberry-ans were quite content in their silence worlds. The only sound we heard from them was the clicking of their keyboards, and the sighing and sometimes chuckling as they learned about good or bad news.

In this day and age, the expression "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with" no longer applies.

Today, if you can't be with the one you love, turn to Blackberry first before you turn to the one you're with.

-- Eric Musa Piliang

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