To listen to a group of students at the University of California’s Berkeley campus talking about their obsessive communications habits, you would think you had stumbled into a meeting of recovering alcoholics. Rich Brown, a graduate student at Berkeley Haas School of Business, confesses to being forced into drastic action the previous evening when, at 10pm, it was time to get down to some serious work. An instant messaging exchange had to be terminated: e-mail, a constant companion, was shut down. “But it’s a compulsion,” he says. “I had to check my e-mail half an hour later. You have to look at it again.”
Laptops are lined up, closed, on the table in front of them; the occasional mobile handset placed alongside like illicit drugs that they have been asked to surrender. These students betray the modern ambivalence of the constantly connected: pride in their technological virtuosity mixed with a self-consciousness about their infatuation that pushes them to joke about their condition.
