2. I have a number of qualms about participating in the story as a local "expert" - but hope that by doing so I might be able to defuse some of the prevailing dichotomies that seem to shape reporting on media (beginning, in this instance, by using the disease model of addiction as the primary frame). Stated another way, I'm hoping to provide more informed and nuanced commentary that would help both the reporter and the audience move away from these sorts of notions of technology (good or bad? cure or disease? blessing or curse, etc.) - notions that fuel the sorts of "moral panic" reporting on new media (currently, e.g., connections between violent video games and recent episodes of violence in schools, etc.)
Charles, it seems to me that the tendency to use disease models for an excess of communicative action -- for discussion of "crackberries", et cetera -- is not really without its offline precedent. I'm thinking very specifically of people who "talk too much"; there's a kind of taboo-like property (that I don't have a better name for -- stigmatization is not quite it...) assigned to such folks that is intuitively parallel to "addiction". I'm sure that other folks on the list will come up with more exemplars. --elijah