So, the Research In Motion servers went down, and some users didn’t have access to their email.
My first thought was that’s pretty scary. Having never owned one, I didn’t realize that the email of enterprise users had to past through the RIM servers, which sort of runs against the philosophy of how the internet work. That is keep everything decentralized, so when one node in the network goes down, traffic does not come to a stand still.
My second thought, was reading about an interesting occurrence of crackberry addicts report a night off from constant connectivity. Of course, client service professionals such as stock brokers potentially could lose money. And a doctor’s blackberry failure could have put patients at significant risk.
However, USA Today reported that many of them got a night off to actually be present and focus on what was in front of them, instead of dealing with constant interruptions. All they hand to do was deal with smirks from Treo users.
Way back when in grad school, I had the fortune to hear the extremely clever Linda Stone, then a researcher at Microsoft. She coined the phrase, “continual partial attention.” You don’t hear about it a lot because for me and most people in the US, it’s just our natural state of being. So, when we find ourselves unconnected and free from distractions, we find it troublesome or a pleasure. Both cases reflect a change from our normal behaviors.
