Prez @ whitehouse.gov

If you are interested in the intersection of rhetoric and computers, this might interest you. And if you're not, what are you doing here?

Jeff Zeleny has written a fascinating piece in the New York Times on what it might mean for Barack Obama to give up his Blackberry phone and email. The information world of a president is crucial to every person in the world. The president has access to all sorts of information denied to the rest of us, but is cut off from much ordinary communication by "the bubble" -- a zone of security, privacy, and protection that can also push presidents into a place where they are entirely out of touch with the ordinary life of everyday persons.

Obama might be the first president, writes Zeleny, to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office.

Jeff Zeleny, "Say Goodbye to BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe," New York Times, 15 November 2008.

photo: BlackBerry Storm from BlackBerry