Could gadgets like BlackBerries and cell phones ring up lawsuits?

[ameilius]

August 25, 2006 (Reuters) -- Keeping employees on electronic leashes such as laptops, BlackBerries and other devices that allow them to be constantly connected to the office could soon lead to lawsuits by those who grow addicted to the technology, a U.S. academic warns. In a follow-up to an earlier paper on employees' tech addictions, Gayle Porter, associate professor of management at the Rutgers University School of Business in Camden, N.J., has written a paper that states that workers whose personal lives suffer as a result of tech addictions could turn their sights on their employers.
"These people that can't keep it within any reasonable parameters and have these problems in their lives, at some point may say, 'My life is not all that great. How did this happen? Who can I blame for this?'," Porter, who co-authored the study with two other academics, said in an interview. "And they're going to say, 'The company.'"

Link = http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9002731

 

[jpom]

I'm getting really sick of all this addiction bs. Frankly IMHO if you let your personal life be destroyed by being addicted to your blackberry, the internet, a game etc. then there is something else wrong, there is some underlying problem.Besides which how can you become addicted to a blackberry, personally I love mine, it gets both my work and personal emails as well as doubling as my work/personal phone, so I carry it everywhere. But really if your in the middle of something and it goes off then ignore it, get to it later. If your working on call or something then you obviously are obligated to answer, but that's not being addicted, because that's part of your job. But if your out on your anniversary on a day off with your Significant Other (or whatever) and you insist on spending the time typing away on your blackberry then a) you have issues b) that's not being addicted to the blackberry that's being a workaholic, and imho workaholics are not really addicted to work but rather they are using work to escape some other part of their life.Either way this is just another example of people not taking responsability for their own problems and trying to make some easy money in the process.

 

[ameilius]

agreed!