One answer to too much tech: Sorry, I’m not here

You get text messages on your cellphone, but you never, ever send one. You don’t do certain e-mails during the day, only at night, after 9. You carry your BlackBerry everywhere you go, except on the golf course.

That’s Bruce Blakeney’s only decree: "No CrackBerry on the course." This is a very personal rule, strictly enforced.

"I’m an IT manager. I’m on call 7 by 24. But, see, it’s like this: You have to take time for yourself. What do you most enjoy doing as a hobby? To me, it’s golf," says Blakeney, 46. "And I don’t carry a thing when I’m golfing. Not a thing. I would never get to really enjoy myself if I carried my BlackBerry with me."

In these multi-tasking, hyperkinetic, gadget-obsessed times, it helps to have a few rules in place, no matter how arbitrary, while clicking our lives away in the techno-sphere. We want control. More to the point, we like to think we are in control.

So office assistant Nakia Bittle, 27, turns her cellphone off the moment she gets home.

"If you need to call me, you can call my home phone. But if you don’t have my home number," says Bittle, laughing, "then you’re not supposed to have it."

"With the number of options people have – we’ve got laptops, cellphones, Treos, BlackBerrys, iPods, you name it – we’re overwhelmed. In the past, people defined themselves by what they did or used. Now you define yourself by what you don’t do or don’t buy," says Kevin Kelly, author of New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World.

Kelly abides by several rules. He doesn’t own a BlackBerry, and only his wife knows his cellphone number. He calls his theory for this idiosyncratic brand of individual rulemaking the "neo-Amish." For his next book, What Technology Wants, he has visited the Amish frequently in Pennsylvania, noting how they adopt or reject new technologies. The Amish use disposable diapers but don’t allow zippers on their clothing. They use rollerblades but cannot drive or own cars. (They can take rides, though.)

"There is no firm consistency," Kelly explains. These rules might not make perfect sense for outsiders, he adds, but for the Amish, they’re logical, a way of lessening their ties to technology, of saying "no, thank you" to the next hot new thing when most of society almost always responds with a hyperventilating "Yes!"

"Many of us have this neo-Amish pattern in our use of technology, and it’s our own way to exert some sort of power over it," says Kelly, former executive editor of Wired magazine, that venerated bible of gizmos. "These gadgets are supposed to be serving us, but we have so many of them that we feel like we’re enslaved to our servants. So we create restrictions to show who’s boss. Like, I may be a slave to e-mail, but I don’t text-message, therefore I really have the upper hand."

Cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken offers this view: "We’re in this process of balancing out the benefits of technology to the costs of technology."

In the beginning of the cellphone era, when cellphones looked like bricks, everyone thought owning one was "all benefits, no cost," says McCracken, a member of MIT’s comparative media studies program and the former director of the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. It wasn’t until later, he says, that we realized the downsides to being connected 24/7, every day, every week.

"Before the cellphone, we can always say, ‘Oh, I was in the yard when you phoned,’ " says McCracken. "Now the last remaining excuse you have is, ‘Oops, I’m in a dead zone.’ This is the curse of digital slavery."

Cole McGee, 33, a consultant, is trying to get out of those invisible handcuffs. She has two self-imposed rules: One, no listening to her iPod on the Washington Metro; two, no bringing her BlackBerry to bed.

On the iPod rule, she explains: "I have this small black book where I collect little snippets of conversations I used to hear on the Metro. One time, there was this woman sitting behind me, talking about the church parking lot where she first smoked a cigarette," says McGee. "But since I got an iPod, I hadn’t been writing on it. You know, I missed hearing those conversations." She took control.

On the BlackBerry rule, she recalls one particularly memorable night: It’s about 3 a.m. The BlackBerry vibrates. It startles her gadget-unfriendly boyfriend, a Brit who didn’t own a cellphone. That was the beginning of the end – not of the BlackBerry, but of their relationship. Since then, "I’ve been leaving my BlackBerry in the foyer," says McGee. The control thing again. — The Washington Post