Hamlet’s Blackberry

Alan Rhodes is a columnist for the Cascadia Weekly and appears regularly on The Chuckanut Radio Hour.

Hamlet’s Blackberry
Building a Good Life in the
  Digital Age
by William Powers
Harper Perennial, 8/9/2011
288 pages, paper, $14.99
ISBN 0061687170

Hardcover edition reviewed

The Vanishing Family Trick. That was the name author William Powers gave to the nightly event. He and his family would be nestled before the fireplace in their Cape Cod living room. Then someone would leave for a glass of water, but not come back. A few minutes later someone else would slip away. Finally, alone with the family cats and dog, Powers would leave as well.

The family had vanished again. They were now all in separate rooms, fixated on glowing computer screens, where they would stay for the rest of the evening.

For several years Powers, a former staff writer for the Washington Post, observed with growing alarm the amount of time he and others were spending in front of “screens,” a word he uses throughout the book for various digital tools including desktop computers, laptops, cell phones, e-readers, etc.

Powers, it is important to note, is not a Luddite and is not opposed to or fearful of electronic technology. He uses a computer and a cell phone, appreciates what they can do, and understands – as a journalist and author – how much they have enhanced his life and, in particular, his ability to do his job. Powers’ concern came from somewhere else, and gradually he was able to identify the problem: the constant use of screens is robbing people of depth.

Powers relates an incident to illustrate what he means. Driving to visit his mother and realizing he’s going to be late, he calls her on his cell phone. When he punches his mother’s number, a photo of her appears on the screen. After he explains to her the delay, he takes another look at the photo before putting away the phone. As he drives through the pine woods, he thinks about his mother, his love for her, the extraordinary person she is, and how he sees flashes of her in his son. In the time it takes to drive to her house, he relives many memories of her.

The cell phone had made the contact possible, but the depth of experience came when the phone was turned off and he had quiet time to reflect. It became clear: when you keep a cell phone pressed to your ear almost constantly during the day, everything remains on a superficial level. When you spend the entire evening shuttling from one website to another, visiting Facebook, writing and answering emails, updating your blog and playing computer games, depth cannot occur.

Here, then, was the problem. We tweet and tap our laptops; we load window on top of window and flit from screen to screen; we talk nonstop into cell phones, take a break with a computer game, pause to check any emails that arrived in the past five minutes, and log on to The Weather Channel when we notice clouds on the horizon.

Later, when the dinner dishes are cleaned up, we head to the desktop and may very well be there until bedtime. In all this, there is no time to absorb, ponder or reflect. Screens have seduced us into a life of constant connectedness, a superficial “busyness” that deprives us of the ability to focus, diminishes our creative potential, and removes us from human contact and the simple pleasures of savoring experience.

In the opening chapters of his book, Powers outlines the issue as he sees it, and proposes that what we need is “a new digital philosophy; a way of thinking that takes into account the human need to connect outward, to answer the call of the crowd, as well as the opposite need for time and space apart. The key is to strike a balance between the two impulses.”

Powers is certainly not the first person who has had second thoughts about the effects of technology on our minds and lives, but in Part Two, the longest section of Hamlet’s Blackberry, he explores solutions to the problem in an original way. He looks at how great minds of the past resolved similar issues. The technologies and time demands were different for the eras in which each of them lived, but all had to find ways to achieve balance between the need to be connected, and the equally important need to disconnect so that serious thinking and reflection could take place. Lessons are provided by a stellar cast: Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Henry David Thoreau and Marshall McLuhan.

Exploring the chapter on Plato is a good way to illustrate what Powers is getting at. In the 5th Century B.C.E., a new technology was catching on in Greece: written language. Many people were worried about what this might do to the mind in a society with a long oral history. Plato’s mentor, Socrates, was especially skeptical of the value of writing things down, preferring instead the immediacy of philosophical dialogue. Reliance on text, Socrates feared, was likely to diminish one’s ability to think quickly and mentally store information.

In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates encounters young Phaedrus who is excited by a lecture he heard that morning by the famous orator Lysias, who argued that people would be better off if their sexual encounters were based on pure lust and avoided all romantic entanglements. Socrates is eager to explore this idea with Phaedrus. At that moment, observes Powers, Socrates “was seeking what everyone with a digital screen is after: contact, friendship, stimulation, ideas, professional and personal growth.”

Phaedrus leads Socrates outside the city walls, to a green spot beside a pleasant stream — a place the old philosopher never goes, preferring the energy and excitement of the agora where ideas fly around as fast as images on a computer screen. Phaedrus needs a break from this, however, and in leading Socrates to a pastoral setting becomes the equivalent of a 21st Century worker in an office cubicle floundering in a sea of emails, websites and text messages, who at lunch time walks to a nearby park bench to assimilate, concentrate and focus.

As they talk, Phaedrus produces a scroll. He has written down Lysias’ lecture so he won’t forget it and can have a permanent record. Phaedrus reads the lecture and Socrates then engages in spirited rebuttal.

What is most interesting for Powers is not the philosophical discussion of lust and love, but another conversation that takes place in the dialogue, one centering on the technology of the written word. Socrates, unimpressed with the static nature of print, would prefer to be in the town square where lively debate continues morning to night. While this may work for Socrates, it is probably not a good idea for most of us. Phaedrus felt the need to remove himself from this constant stimulation to a calm rural locale where he can digest and ponder what he has heard. To remain in the midst of incessant philosophical argumentation is not unlike spending all your time in front of screens, never closing the laptop, never turning off the iPhone.

There is a second key point about this technology in Phaedrus, centering on Socrates’ fear that writing will encourage laziness. Although Plato has elsewhere called Socrates “the wisest, the justest, and the best of all the men,” in this dialogue Plato seems to be saying the old philosopher is missing the point. Writing allows a transmission of ideas across space and time that would be otherwise impossible. We would, as an obvious example, know little of Socrates had his conversations not been written down by Plato.

An even more significant point in the context of Powers’ thesis is that the depth of experience does not begin until Phaedrus puts down the manuscript. The scroll was an important technological tool that allowed Phaedrus to deliver a near perfect transcription of Lysias’ ideas but, like turning off the computer, it must be set aside before Phaedrus and Socrates can begin the analysis and dialectic that moves far beneath the surface of the words on the parchment.

In each of the six chapters that follow, Powers relates how another great thinker found a way to achieve a balance between the need to be connected and the equally important need to disconnect.

The book’s title is taken from the chapter in which Powers looks at a popular technology of Shakespeare’s time: a tablet composed of treated paper that could be erased with a damp cloth. A busy Elizabethan might spend much of the day jotting down a jumble of notes, ideas, reflections and appointments. In the evening anything worth saving could be recopied into a journal for future consideration, and the rest could be wiped away – much like hitting the delete button on a keyboard.

In the final section of Hamlet’s Blackberry – “In Search of Depth: Ideas in Practice” – Powers takes the lessons learned from each of his historical figures and applies them to contemporary life. The result is a practical guide for living with technology and its benefits, while not allowing it to consume our time and the richness non-digital (ND) life has to offer.

One idea that readers might find both alluring and anxiety-producing is what Powers calls the Internet Sabbath, a concept gleaned in part from Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau built his house close enough to Concord so that he could participate in the lively intellectual life of the town, but far enough away to make it a retreat from the hyper-stimulation of New England literary life.

The Powers family, with some trepidation, decided that they would turn off all computers on Friday at bedtime, and not turn them on again until Monday morning. The early days were difficult and felt like deprivation, but gradually things began to change and the texture and quality of the weekend was enhanced and deepened.

After a few months, the Internet Sabbath had become sacred. One Friday, Powers’ wife announced that she had some urgent work that had to be done, and she would have to break the Internet Sabbath and spend Saturday at the computer. Waking up on Saturday morning, Powers saw that her computer was not turned on. His wife, still in bed, sleepily explained that it “was so depressing, the thought of waking up on Saturday to emails, that I stayed up late and got everything done.”

While Hamlet’s Blackberry covers some complex territory and explores a number of weighty ideas, the prose is lively and informal. The conversational tone carries one smoothly through material that could easily become overly-academic and didactic. And while we might enjoy the pleasures of Power’s relaxed narrative, he would probably remind us that an important part of the process is yet to come: when we close the book and reflect on its ideas or discuss them with others. At that point we begin to experience the depth that Powers has been encouraging us to seek. §