Fran Stover sent out an electronic It’s a boy! birth announcement, complete with picture, when she upgraded to a burgundy BlackJack II from Samsung in March. She nicknamed him Jack. When she knew she wouldn’t have access to him for a spell, she worried about hurting his feelings and wondered if she should hire a babysitter.
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Lucy Hackman flew to Bermuda last month for a wedding. On her way to the hotel, she fixed her attention not on the miles of ocean outside her taxi window but on the tiny window of her BlackBerry.
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Megan Renz, who typically sends around 700 texts a day, including rapid-fire sessions when she’s at the park with her 4-year-old son, Landon, curbed her online habit slightly during a Hawaiian vacation in May, when she jumped on her computer for only four hours a day. For fun.
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Restaurant meals, family outings and holiday gatherings — not to mention movie dates, birthday parties and even baby showers — used to be about enjoying the moment of, say, a shared joke, a knowing glance or a sip of cold beer over a sunset. Now, thanks to technology, those moments are multi-tasked to the minute, to the point where even the digitally addicted admit they’re so burrowed into their virtual lives they sometimes miss out on the real thing.
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Cell phone cameras have replaced cigarette lighters as the concert torch of choice. Sure, scads of sequined gloves were dug out of closets, but Michael Jackson’s memorial was remarkable more as a mass Facebook status update: 800,000 were posted during the two-hour tribute. For the July 15 premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, actually attending the event was only half the goal, it seemed, as Hogwarts-dressed teens texted wish you were here-style postcards to those who weren’t. And remember when then-presidential…