The Barackberry shows what Obama’s America can be: modern, in touch and in control

By Alex Smith

Some of us may not like it, but we all know that digital technology, and emailing in particular, is an everyday part of modern life.

So after weeks of conjecture and fretted behind-the-scenes decision making, one of the presidential transition’s seemingly more trivial matters has finally been put to bed, and Barack Obama will be allowed to keep his Blackberry in the White House.

Obama is a well-known Blackberry addict and his success in the presidential campaign is attributed in small part to his use of gadgets to stay ahead of the game and glean information in real time from a wide selection of sources.

His briefing documents and memos were rarely presented to him in hardcopy; his staff were regularly seen prising him away from blogs like the Huffington Post; and changes to speeches were made in red type on his laptop, in hotel rooms and on the campaign bus. It’s a laptop that will become familiar to us all, as it’s about to be instated on the wooden desk of the Oval Office.

But while Obama’s desire to stay in touch from inside the impenetrable walls of the White House is indicative of his personality and vision – modern, communicative, connected, in control – the fact that he is irremovable from his digitoys is also demonstrative of a wider understanding of the powers of technology, and of how he might harness it to run America.

Under his guidance, there’ll be new initiatives to lay down high-speed broadband lines across rural America; there’ll be a new focus on powering the country by sustainable means such as wind and solar energy; there’ll be electronic medical archiving based on the NHS system; and, as the focus on the newly restyled whitehouse.gov already shows, there’ll be a more transparent and accountable web-based hub for the flow of shared government information. The new administration is also considering ways to announce major policy through text messages, email and YouTube.

Of course, there are a number of security issues to bear in mind when the president is a fully paid-up member of the social networking generation, and the secret service is considering how to reconcile the urgent, traditional demands of the presidency with Obama’s micro-management of his affairs.

But these are hurdles that will have to be overcome, because when a president is so insistent on retaining his most trusted communications device, it can only point the way to a future of more open and interactive government.