February 22, 2008
Should blackberries come with a health warning?
Is the cell phone industry headed down the same road as the tobacco industry, with health warnings on it's packaging? It could happen for two reasons, the first if further studies conclusively prove that cell phones really do cause different types of cancer, and/or, because it's addictive.
The latter is an idea floated by UK researchers studying technology addiction. Tom Simonite for New Scientist Blog>Space reports.
Nada Kakabadse and Susan Bailey of The University of Northampton are interested in technology addiction and have just launched an online survey to gather more data on people's use of technology in the workplace and how it affects the rest of their life - like fast food. You can take part in the survey yourself here.
Kakabadse told Simonite that the explosion of information technologies over the last 20 years has happened without much scrutiny on its effect on people. Technologies introduced to improve productivity and communications can have wider, possibly negative impacts."
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2008/02/019164.htm
