At Meetings, It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners - NYTimes.com

Continuous partial attention and meeting etiquette

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.

But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

At Meetings, It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners - NYTimes.com