BlackBerry's network was down during much of the past week - this affected academics, teenage texters, as well as City professionals and businesspeople who rely heavily on their BlackBerrys. See here for some funny tweets on the outage.
This is yet more bad news for Research in Motion, the company which owns the BlackBerry brand. First, there is the competition, with the iPhone 4 proving to be a big hit with consumers (click here). Second, there was the negative publicity during Britain's summer riots, with many rioters using their BlackBerrys to co-ordinate looting (click here).
BlackBerry's network failure would have had a detrimental effect on teenage texters. A recent study found that the average American girl sends 4,000 texts per month! Niall Ferguson has recently argued that texting is making kids stupid. He has suggested that parents remove mobile devices from their kids and send them to book camp, where they spend two weeks reading and discussing classic literature. I agree that technology is affecting the ability of the current generation to think, read and write. More importantly, however, texting etc. distracts and shortens attention spans.