I recently switched to the Blackberry after spending the last couple of years on two other models of Smartphones. At first I felt as though I were driving a Hummer—it just seemed like way too much phone for me. Of course, I quickly got used to the various bells and whistles and have already begun to take them for granted.
The Blackberry has provided me some important insights into the lives of our clients and how they receive our emails. In today’s understaffed corporate world, many people shuttle from meeting to meeting, keeping in touch primarily through their Blackberry. Desks have too often become the place to deposit a briefcase in the morning and retrieve personal belongings at the end of the day.
While the Blackberry has enabled those on the go to maintain correspondence, it has done so at a hefty price. Aside from what typing with our thumbs has done to spelling, grammar and etiquette, it has forced us to reduce outgoing communications to short blurbs that can be tapped out surreptitiously during meetings or while on the phone, ordering a latte, or tying our kids’ shoes.
Lengthy incoming emails are often skimmed with the intention of fully addressing them when the reader has more time. But unless he or she tags these emails as “unopened”, they will likely go unnoticed the next time email is checked at a computer. And even the most diligent recipient can easily overlook action items buried deep within spam-laden IN boxes.
The brevity of most Blackberry exchanges not only leads to over simplification but can also lead to misinterpretation. And with so many messages vying for the attention of readers in the midst of countless other activities, is the Blackberry really facilitating communication or is creating a Tower of Babel? One thing is for sure—it does make us all thumbs.
Tags: email, smartphones
Another eye-opener about Blackberries is how often our carefully-formatted messages (bullets, italics, boldface, tabs) are reduced to text-only. I now understand why our web development team was adamant that we default to sending all emails as text only rather than rich-text or html – at least with text there is some hope they’ll be received looking something like they were written.