Will the Blackberry Sink the Presidency?

And a great cry arose from all across the land: in business offices where managers flashed back to important details they had missed during meetings; in cubicles where wage slaves recalled the countless hours lost trying to figure out what they were doing just before the interruption; at power-lunch spots from Manhattan to Malibu where patrons mourned the relationships they had sundered with their habit; in homes where spouses seethed over the third party in their bed; in labs where scientists studied the impact of technology on thinking; on train platforms where commuters wistfully recalled the days when they spent their wait mulling, pondering and daydreaming. That cry, uttered in response to the news that President Obama was getting to keep his beloved BlackBerry, sounded like this:

Uh-oh.

Technology has affected the way people think, interact and make decisions ever since Homo erectus mastered fire and, for the first time, had a way to keep surplus mammoth from rotting. Result: cooperative hunting. The cognitive and social effects of the BlackBerry on its 21 million users aren't so unambiguously beneficial. So while legions of BlackBerry fans cheer Obama's success in keeping his, insisting it makes users more productive and connected, experts in cognitive psychology and in human-machine interactions who study pop-ups, e-mail alerts, calendar reminders and instant messaging—the most intrusive and ubiquitous pre-BlackBerry technologies—have two things to say: distraction overload, and continuous partial attention. For whatever the virtues of a handheld, there is no question that, depending how you use it, you risk never focusing exclusively on any thought or perception for long and never being able to work straight through to completion on anything. That's OK for tasks you can handle with half your cerebral lobes tied behind your back. It's less fine when the task is, say, watching for track signals while operating a train.

How damaging an interruption is depends on when it occurs. In a 2004 study, scientists led by Brian Bailey of the University of Illinois had volunteers edit text and search the Internet while being interrupted by news alerts. It was much less annoying to be interrupted between what the scientists call "coarse breakpoints," such as at the completion of a paragraph or thought. Not only is it easier to jump back into the previous task after the interruption, but when you are not trying to keep in your head what you need to finish a task you can pay more attention to the interruption itself. If you answer the BlackBerry's call at natural breakpoints, you're much more likely to be able to take in the e-mail and then resume what you were doing without that "where was I?" brain lock. In some demanding tasks, however, there may not be any natural breakpoints. Pilots who are interrupted during a preflight checklist sometimes miss an item when they try to pick up where they left off, notes psychologist Deborah Boehm-Davis of George Mason University, who studies interruptions. Last summer's crash of an airliner taking off from Madrid was apparently the result of an interruption-induced error; 153 people died.

There are no good studies on how often BlackBerry users let themselves be interrupted by its seductive call, but research on other electronic interruptions is not encouraging. When Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, shadowed employees at two high-tech firms, she found that the average worker spends only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and asked to do something else. IT workers have it worse, switching attention every three minutes, on average. The BlackBerry (which isn't nicknamed CrackBerry for nothing) is way more seductive than, say, e-mail alerts. Thanks to its growing social and cultural cachet, it can make the most inconsequential middle manager feel as important as the CEO who must always be reachable, and it can feed the illusion of the lowliest salaryman that his input is so central he must be thumbing away at the dinner table and on vacation.

The distraction of almost-irresistible interruptions has been the killer app, so to speak, for some BlackBerry newbies. Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, like almost every politician on the Hill, got a BlackBerry after 9/11 for security purposes. But he gave it back. "I was always distracted," Cochran said. "I couldn't concentrate. Every time the light came on or it beeped, I felt this compulsion to stop everything I was doing." Though he doesn't begrudge his colleagues for their addiction, Cochran says the result is that during meetings on the Hill almost everyone is "always checking messages" or typing, he says. "It just beeps or buzzes, all the time, and people get up and leave the room."