Marion Underwood calls her academic study, “The Blackberry Project.” A title that would work equally well is “
Panopticon, Jr.” For the past four years, the University of Texas-Dallas developmental psychology professor has essentially wire-tapped 175 Texas teens, capturing every text message, email, photo, and IM sent on Blackberries that she provided to them, creating a rich database that now contains millions of funny, explicit, sexual, and inane messages for academic study. Half a million new messages pour into the database every month. This summer, she’s adding Facebook content to the mix as well. The teens sacrificed their privacy for science… and a free smartphone, data plan and unlimited text messaging.
