TORONTO - Quitting smoking was apparently quite a battle for Barack Obama. And now the U.S. president-elect is facing another significant habit-kicking struggle -- giving up his BlackBerry.
Obama, an avid BlackBerry user, has reportedly been told he should not email during his tenure in the White House.
An emailing U.S. president would be an irresistible target for hackers, the thinking goes. And any emails he sends or replies to would potentially be part of the record of his presidency, subject to subpoena.
"There's no question that a leader has to be very careful about that stuff for security reasons," says Peter Donolo, a Toronto-based consultant who served for years as former prime minister Jean Chretien's director of communications.
"All it takes with an email is someone just to forward it to somebody else -- and it's a matter of public record."
But for Obama, kicking the BlackBerry habit may not be easy. This is, after all, a wired politician whose campaign masterfully exploited the potential of YouTube, mass email and Facebook -- on which he has nearly 3.2 million registered supporters.
The mere thought of an enforced eight-year BlackBerry time-out is enough to set the thumbs of some users convulsing.
But while people talk about being addicted to their BlackBerrys -- nicknamed CrackBerrys -- addiction researchers aren't necessarily comfortable with likening heavy BlackBerry use to obsessive gambling, excessive drinking or even nicotine addiction.
"It's a habituation thing. So you've just got to break the habit," says Benedikt Fischer, a professor with Simon Fraser University's Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction, in Burnaby, B.C.
"Whereas the smoking, there's a physical dependence."
Nigel Turner, a psychologist with the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, agrees.
"I can't see it being a huge problem to withdraw. If you take a person's email away, they might be unhappy, but they're not going to have physical symptoms of cravings. They won't be hiding it in a brown paper bag."
Gayle Porter, a management professor at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J., believes BlackBerrys are fuelling addictions to email and the Internet in some users. That said, she thinks being reliant on a tool is not the same as being addicted to it.
"Whether or not Barack Obama is addicted to his technology is yet to be seen," says Porter, who described the addictive nature of the devices in a 2006 study.
"There is a true difference between being a heavy user that has a little bit of difficulty breaking the habit and being someone who is actually addicted to it and is going to sneak around and cause problems and disregard everyone's advice."
She calls obsessive BlackBerry checking "a fidget-type habit," something one gets used to doing to fill free seconds or even lulls in a conversation. "It is hard to step away from those."
But Porter and others think Obama will quickly find he has a multitude of other communications options on which to draw to stay current and stay in touch.
"There will be other tools that he can use and he'll have an array of technology that would probably make James Bond blush," says Donolo, who has a BlackBerry now but left Chretien's employ before BlackBerrys and iPhones became must-have tools on Parliament Hill.
"The tradeoff to that is, if you could turn to the person on your right and say: `What's the latest on such and such?' and turn to the person on your left and say `Have we gotten any response yet from so-and-so?' that's very different than the way most of us live," Porter agrees.
"If I had all those aides scurrying around to keep me updated on everything I needed to know, it would be much easier to do without my technology. So I think he's going to have some advantages there."
Still she admits the loss of the BlackBerry may signal something else for the president-elect, something he alluded to in his first post-victory interview which aired Sunday night on CBS's "60 Minutes."
Obama admitted he wished he could just go for a walk -- a simple activity he can no longer enjoy without a phalanx of Secret Service agents. Personal email is another of the infringements on Obama the man that Obama the president will have to put up with.
"There's going to be a lot of little things like that that will change in his new reality," Porter says. "I think that's a good way to put it."
