Culture Jamming the Crackberry

Wowza! Have I been swamped these past few days...I haven't blogged in a while! But I must say that some good came out my time away from the blog, because I got a part-time job! Yup, I am now once again employed, well at least for a few hours a week. The position is a marketing position with a really small company - 3 people plus me to be exact. It's cool because I get to oversee large marketing projects from beginning to end.

But anyway, the other marketing guy who is also a new hire owns a Blackberry which is ALWAYS buzzing and which brings me to the reason for this post. I would say that I'm a pretty savvy technology user and probably a 'heavy' computer user. Let's just say that between writing papers, researching, blogging, Facebooking, watching-tv- shows- I missed -because -of- class, occasional graphic designing and an assortment of other random timewasting ventures I'm online ALOT. But for some reason I have not yet fallen prey to the Blackberry monomania (Google that word!) *sidenote*! HA...I'm watching Conan and he's talking to Jerry Seinfeld who's talking about why he doesn't have a Blackberry! What a coicidence...LOL. But I digress...I've been reading this book entitled Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn who is the founder of the Adbusters magazine. 'Culture Jamming' as I understand it from that most revered source Wikipedia *wink* is the individual rejection of all forms of herd mentality usually asociated with popular culture. So does my Blackberry rejection make me a Culture Jammer????? Probably not, I know.

I think the reason I don't have a Blackberry is because I'm afraid to be a slave to something else. Honestly, I feel like my email and I should be getting married soon, because we've been together for about ten years and we converse several times a day! Then there's Facebook, which I'm proud to say has been relegated to a much lower position in my hierarchy of internet time-wasting. I read blogs and news like it's my religion which is sad because I don't even read my Bible as much! And there are a whole host of random other internet things I somehow feel obligated to check in on at least once every day. It's not a prety picture. When did I become so tied to my technology? There was a time when I could sit and read for hours, whole nights depending on the book actually. But now I sit to read for leisure and within 30 minutes I kid you not, I'm distracted by an idea I have to post about, a revelation I have to research, a historical fact I need to Google. It's really crazy and sometimes scary.
As a non-Blackberry user I often wonder what's really happening on that little Blackberry screen of the users I cross paths with. Their emails must be more important than the ones I receive if they elicit a Pavlovian response everytime the darned thing buzzes right? And you know, I can concede that for business owners, managers and decision-makers who travel alot a Blackberry can be very useful, but do the rest of us normal folk really need it? It's one of the questions I ask myself whenever phone envy hits me. So I guess for the time being, or until I become the owner of a multi-national corporation I'm ok with being a Crackberry culture jammer.