CELLPHONES AND HOW PEOPLE WORK. Forty years ago I was riding in an elevator in which young lawyers speculated as to how long it would be with computer technology before they could do their legal work at home without having to come in to the office. The Economist had a prediction soon afterward that the day was not far off when workers would go to a local center with a computer and fax equipment rather than commute to an office. The predicted change never happened on the scale that was expected. The Economist for April 12 had a special section which describes how lawyers and others have finally been unchained from their offices. The technology which brought this about was the Blackberry, first developed in 1999, which made portable e mail a reality. The Economist suggests that the mobile era arguably began with the iPhone in 2007.
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The Blackberry revolutionized mobile e-mail with wireless push (where e-mail gets instantly forwarded to the device) just as the iPhone revolutionized mobile web browsing by making sites look just like they do on a desktop computer. Even now that the iPhone finally has enterprise features I don’t see die-hard fans giving up their Crackberrys for it. I remember that a lot of business and government people panicked when there was talk of RIM going out of business over patent issues a while back.
I remember my obstetrician, a very busy woman with four children, telling me she liked going to the dentist because while she was in that chair no one could reach her and bother her with a demand, request, whatever. Clearly, this was before cell phones, etc. We have now lost our personal space completely. I try not to give out my cell phone number, and I very rarely have my cell phone on, only for special purposes. I want my space. As an old friend of mine used to say, “The phone is my servant; not my master.”