Is Gazing at Your Blackberry Grounds for Divorce?

Let's test your RQ - your rudeness quotient. On a scale of 1= No Problem and 10=Hanging at Dawn Without Benefit of a Trial, rate the following:

• You go to a business lunch and your dining companion puts a BlackBerry on the table and checks it compulsively throughout the meal.
• While you're conducting a seminar you notice that half the attendees are staring at smartphones and some are working them with their thumbs.
• You're out on a date and you reach out to grasp your lover's hand, but there's a cell phone in it.
• Your wife is discussing resort plans for your second honeymoon. She asks you something important. You ask her to repeat what she said because you were too absorbed checking fantasy baseball scores on your Palm Pre.
• The bored concertgoer beside you is checking his email during a tender pianissimo passage of your favorite symphony.

These vignettes exemplify an evolving crisis in etiquette prompted by a new generation of smartphones and other handheld communication devices. New York Times reporter Alex Williams has chronicled the challenge of holding the social fabric together while gamers, bloggers, tweeters, and email checkers succumb to the temptation, if not the compulsion, to indulge their private pursuits in public.

Obviously your RQ depends on which side of the device you're on. "A spirited debate about etiquette has broken out" Williams writes. "Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril." Like it or not, the field is tilting in the direction of the techno-evangelists. Williams reports that a third of some 5300 workers pulled by a job listings website said "they frequently checked e-mail in meetings." However, out of those that do, "Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices."

You may be lucky to get away with mere castigation. Employees have been fired when caught using their device frivolously. Business leaders instruct attendees to turn off all electronic devices at meetings on pain of ostracism or worse, and visitors to President Obama's Oval Office are required to leave their BlackBerrys with his secretary (though its well known the President himself is addicted to his). Fistfights have broken out in theaters over cellphones ringing at critical moments in a performance.

And inappropriate use of a device can be fatal. A growing number of car crashes involved drivers talking on cellphones or looking at text message screens, and these practices are being banned in several states. A fatal train accident in California was traced to the engineer's being distracted by text messages.

And concentration on the screen of your gadget instead of the eyes of your beloved is wreaking havoc in relationships and can contribute to breaking up. On the other hand, if you're determined to break up with someone, a cell phone can come in handy. A Malaysian government official notified his wife that he was divorcing her - via cell phone. (An Islamic court overruled him, but nice try, huh?)

You can read both sides of the debate in Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners. Then let's review the score on our RQ quiz. How'd you do?

Richard Curtis

Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

A Fortune Awaits Discoverer of Cure for App Addiction

Apps gone wild!

If you loaded one new application per day into your iPhone, it would take at least 27 years to try them all. According to Matt Richtel and Laura M. Holson of the New York Times, over 10,000 new apps have been posted to the Apple store, generating 300 million downloads. "The new status symbol is what your phone can do — count calories, teach Spanish, simulate a flute, or fling a monkey from a tree," they write. "The popularity of such applications for Apple’s iPhone, the leader of the transformation, is driving a fierce competition among the makers of the BlackBerry and Palm devices, and even Google and Microsoft." One venture capital company thinks it's such a goldmine that it has created a $100 million fund for iPhone developers.

Naturally, our favorite is the Stanza, the free e-book reader, and we've also written about the Android-powered barcode scanner. But it's not just the thousands of wonderful, stupid, crazy, and absorbing add-ons that make the phone-omenon notable, but their convergence into one device that brings us closer to the science fiction dream of a personal slave-device that carries out our every command at the graze of a fingertip.

But like any other convenience there is a danger of addiction and even abuse. In December Joe Wilcox, author of the Apple Watch blog, put a name on a syndrome whose symptoms are all too familiar to iPhone users: Apple App Addiction. "I've casually asked about two dozen other iPhone or iPod Touch users about their devices," writes Wilcox. "Nearly all confessed to being app addicts."

It looks like Apple App Addiction is the new obesity. What are the signs you're hooked? Says Wilcox,

Can you put the devices down? Do you use them frequently throughout the day—and more frequently than you would a vanilla cell phone or music player? Do you compulsively check your e-mail, Facebook or Twitter—or other app, perhaps? In a crowded room—maybe it's a party or business meeting—do you tap, tap, tap that touchscreen?

If 'yes' is the answer to any question, you're an Apple app addict.

Wilcox describes the technique for "hooking" users that sounds exactly like the way dope dealers hook victims:

Some of these app addict dealers are smart. Tapulous gave iPhone and iPod Touch users just a taste with Tap Tap Revenge. "C`mon, it's free. Try it." The game is highly addictive, and it's got a killer soundtrack. But successors like Nine Inch Nails Revenge and Weezer Christmas cost five bucks a piece. Damn, if they're not addictive, too. That taste leads to paid addiction.

There are organizations for treating alcohol, dope, gambling and even sex addiction. But I'm not aware of an Apps Anonymous (at least not one in my community) and because of the syndrome's potential impact on workplace and school performance, it may be the deadliest of all. Wilcox says, "People ask to be buried with their cell phones," and I can personally testify to that. Not long ago I attended a funeral in which the recently departed was laid out with his beloved cell phone hooked to his belt. "It was a part of him," his widow confessed to me. "No one ever saw him without it." When I viewed the corpse I noticed a blinking light indicating the phone was on. Someone else noticed it too, because, as a macabre practical joke or maybe just to see if the deceased would pick up, they called him and his unique ringtone warbled.

The thing is, nobody laughed. It seems like the most natural thing in the world.

RC