Watching the Crackberry Addicts

Let me say this about that:

I've just spent a week in New Orleans running a meeting attended by more than 500 people. My organization charged them $895 per head for registration. The cost of the conference itself combined with airfare and hotel likely ran most companies upwards of $1600 per person.

In every meeting room (and this is not a sweeping generality - I mean every) , at any point during a session I could look around and see roughly 50% of the audience diddling with their Crackberries. When these devices started to gain wider use, people would at least do their business under the table. Now the device is above the table receiving the attention due a speaker. Why spend all that money to go to another city, attend a meeting that is supposed to be educational and then ignore the proceedings most of the time?

I don't like those gadgets. I think they're rude and the behavior developing around them antisocial. I can walk past a conference room in my office and see the same thing - all the people down one side of the table are sending messages or reading - oblivious to the action and the people in the room. I have co-workers who can't be bothered to say hello as they move through the halls involved with their little portable piece of cyberspace.

This is, I suspect, one of the great paradoxes of this age - who can we be so connected yet so utterly disconnected?

My boss mentioned to me that for our next on-site meeting, I should get one of these toys from the IT folks. And she's right - it'll help us communicate better when we're out of the office. However, I made it clear to her that it is only for when I travel. My attention span is shrinking fast enough as it is.