Blackberry Bambalam

I'm on the last day of my spring break trip visiting my dad in Florida, and decided to write about my brother's lack of involvement in activities in order to keep his facebook up to date via Blackberry.

As I type, he is updating his friends that he is watching South Park and that I am typing a blog.

At first I wanted to write about how newer technologies ruin family time and blah, blah, blah, but I realized that Blackberry has added to the entire vacation, including humor because his pictures in the family album with be mostly of him on Blackberry.

Last night, before going into The Moose Lodge to sing karaoke with geriatrics, a blood donor bus was out front trying to persuade people to give blood. My brother agreed in order to get a t-shirt. They allowed me in the bus to document the event but said that I couldn't take pictures. I did anyway with Blackberry and they didn't even know. They turned out really cool. He also donated his left arm to get blood from so that he could keep up to date and type using his right hand.

Also, despite the distraction, it's not like he was constantly on it. When we were taking pictures or discussing things or sight-seeing, he wasn't on it. It definitely took him out of some conversations, but for the most part, I didn't feel like he wasn't as much a part of the vacation as I was.

So technology does distract us occasionally from just face-to-face communication, but for the most part and as a whole it doesn't. It's just another part of the vacation. He let us know what our cousins (his main viewers on facebook) were doing, and we were also able to communicate with them ANYTIME because he was already mid-conversation with them. We even got our future family reunion almost all straightened out, just because the option to talk to them was available, and we were discussing family things anyway. Technology is just another thing on the vacation, like shopping or going to a museum. They take up time, too, so who is to say what is worthwhile and what isn't?