BlackBerry-aholic by William Moyers on Creators.com

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BlackBerry-aholic

For dinner the other night, I ate too much, and my stomach growled. Instinctively, I reached for the BlackBerry on my belt. I thought it was buzzing. It wasn't.

A few days later, I was waiting impatiently for an e-mail reply from a colleague at work. I kept gazing at the flashing light on my electronic appendage, until I was convinced it was flashing red to alert me to the incoming message. But it was still green.

From cell phone to e-mail to text messages to Internet access, my BlackBerry all but defines my relationship to daily life. It reminds me of a popular saying in political circles in Washington in the early 1990s, when the Cable News Network was omnipotent: "I have CNN. Therefore, I am."

Thankfully, I am not a BlackBerry, at least not yet. But I have developed a dependency on what it does to me and for me, to the point now that my innate human feelings and perceptions have been hijacked by a power greater than myself. No wonder Webster's New World College Dictionary recognized "Crackberry" as the 2006 Word of the Year. Rarely do I go anywhere without my driver's license, some cash in my pocket, an ATM card and my BlackBerry. And when I do leave it behind — even on a weekend when I'm just running errands in the neighborhood — I feel vulnerable, and the craving begins.

I'm not ready to label this baffling relationship with my mobile device an addiction. As a recovering alcoholic and addict, I know firsthand the ravages of a true dependency on a drug — financial ruin, fractured families, crime, despair and death. I disdain the use of the suffix "-aholic" to describe people who love chocolate or shop all the time or work too much.

But there's no doubt my BlackBerry gets in the way of my ability to focus on a sunset or relish the sound of a cardinal singing from the top of a tree in the springtime or hear snowflakes falling in the forest or pay attention to the banter of my kids.

It disrupts the routine of my workday when it delivers a personal call or e-mail. It steals my private time when a colleague tries to connect after my workday ends. I cannot deny it: I have failed to learn how to live with its ubiquitous presence or to live without its always being turned on. Only a dead battery offers any real respite.

The other day, my mother e-mailed me a link (which I received via my BlackBerry) to a story headlined "If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online." The Kaiser Family Foundation study finds that kids ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven hours a day connected to some electronic device. Even worse, because they are multi-tasking, according to the study, they are packing 11 hours of media content into those seven hours. In other words, they are being stimulated to the max.

"I'm SO glad I'm a grandparent," my mother wrote at the top of the e-mail. And a top-notch grandparent she is to her five grandchildren.

But after reading the story, I realized that nobody is immune to the relentless temptations of today's electronic world or the problems it has caused. And if all of society, from grandparents and parents to teachers and even young people themselves, doesn't push back and set boundaries, it won't be long before LSD guru Timothy Leary's famous counterculture phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," is America's new "E pluribus unum."

William Moyers is the vice president of foundation relations for the Hazelden Foundation and the author of "Broken," his best-selling memoirs, and "A New Day, A New Life." Please send your questions to William Moyers at wmoyers@hazelden.org. To find out more about William Moyers and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.