A nation divided. Not by birth, or wealth or age, but by technology. Last week the frustration was shared from the top deck of the bus to the foredeck of the luxury yacht. It was the week of the three-day BlackBerry crash, days without email, days without connection on the move for millions of teenagers and executives alike. And it was the week in which iPhone users, with their functioning technology, became smugger still.
BlackBerry users, the desperate seekers of the envelope with the little red star (its motif for incoming mail), struggled to adjust: already owners cannot plan a riot or a meeting without the rectangular devices. On Twitter (another network on which we have become dependent) the complaints came thick and fast – from Jemima Khan, Kevin Petersen and Alastair Campbell. Indeed, Blair's chief spinner was rapidly reduced to the state of Malcolm Tucker, as he described the situation with an evocative neologism: woeful.
Parent company Rim provides what has become a utility service. In that sense the Canadian business let us down: just four centers’ worldwide handle all BlackBerry traffic on a private network. Growth has been rapid, but the infrastructure is too centralized, and the underlying technology has been patched up and patched up again. When something went wrong, as it did at Rim's European HQ in Slough, the weaknesses in the system were exposed. Unlike the internet, this was not a system built to survive a nuclear war, or even a routine technology upgrade.
Of course, BlackBerry owners soon began to manage. By the third day, one could imagine the far-off time of 2005, when people could leave the office and not be pursued by 100 messages demanding instant response. Conversations could continue uninterrupted… until mercifully the emails flooded in again. But we should all beware; it could be Facebook, Google or Twitter next time. The technology of our everyday lives is only one design flaw away from collapse.
i think we do sir (bob marley sterling colorado 17)