Hamlet’s BlackBerry
A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age
William Powers
For Ann Shallcross, who connected
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue: The Room
Introduction
Part I: What Larks? The Conundrum of the Connected Life
1 Busy, Very Busy: In a Digital World, Where’s the Depth?
2 Hello, Mother: The Magic of Screens
3 Gone Overboard: Falling Out with the Connected Life
4 Solutions That Aren’t: The Trouble with Not Really Meaning It
Part II: Beyond the Crowd Teachings of the Seven Philosophers of Screens
5 Walking to Heaven: Plato Discovers Distance
6 The Spa of the Mind: Seneca on Inner Space
7 Little Mirrors: Gutenberg and the Business of Inwardness
8 Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Shakespeare on the Beauty of Old Tools
9 Inventing Your Life: Ben Franklin on Positive Rituals
10 The Walden Zone: Thoreau on Making the Home a Refuge
11 A Cooler Self: McLuhan and the Thermostat of Happiness
Part III: In Search of Depth Ideas in Practice
12 Not So Busy: Practical Philosophies for Every Day
13 Disconnectopia: The Internet Sabbath
Afterword: Back to the Room
Notes
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
The Room
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap…
Imagine you’re in a gigantic room, a room so spacious it can comfortably hold more than a billion people. In fact, that’s how many people are there with you right now.
Despite its size, the room is ingeniously designed so everyone is in close proximity to everyone else. Thus any person in the room can easily walk over to any other person and tap him or her on the shoulder.
As you move around the room each day, this is exactly what happens. Wherever you go, people come up to you and tap you on the shoulder. Some tap gently, some firmly, but they all want the same thing: a little of your time and attention.
Some ask you questions and wait for answers. Others request favors. There are people who are eager to sell you things and other people who want to buy things of yours.
Some share personal news and photos from their recent travels. Others want only to talk business. Occasionally someone taps to say they miss you—which is a little odd, since they’re right there in the room with you—and they give you big hugs and kisses. Certain friends tap often to keep you abreast of everything they’re thinking and doing, no matter how trivial. “I’m now eating a cheeseburger,” one will say and hold it up for you to see.
Encounters often overlap. As you’re dealing with one person, another comes along and taps, and you have to choose between them.
You do pretty well managing all these overtures, while also making your own. It’s kind of thrilling to be in the room. There’s always something going on, and you’re learning a lot. And some of these people—maybe twenty or thirty out of the billion—really matter to you. You make a point of tapping them as often as possible, and when they tap you back, it really feels nice.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
So it goes all day and night. The enormous room is a nonstop festival of human interaction.
Like everyone else in the room, you have a personal zone where you eat, sleep, and hang out. Your zone is nicely furnished and quite comfortable. But it has no walls, and people seeking you out can come in at any time. If you happen to be asleep, they leave messages, sometimes labeling them URGENT. You find them when you wake up each morning, dozens of messages waiting for answers.
After a few years, you grow a bit tired of life in the room. It’s getting exhausting, all this tapping. You crave some time away from all those other people, their needs and demands, and the strange pull that life in the room has on you.
So you decide to take a little vacation. You’ll leave the room for a few days, go someplace where nobody can find you. You know exactly the kind of place it will be, too: fresh air, a big empty sky, no sound except the birds and the wind moving through the trees. Best of all, there will be no other people. You’ll just sit by yourself and let your mind float free.
The more you imagine it, the more you can’t wait to be there. Why didn’t you think of this before?
You pack a small bag and head for the outer reaches of the room. After a short time, you come to one of the walls. Your eyes sweep its surface, searching for a door. There doesn’t seem to be one, but the wall continues in both directions. For no particular reason, just a hunch, you turn left.
You walk on, following the perimeter of the room while watching carefully for an exit. As on any other day, people come over frequently and tap you. There’s a new tap every few minutes.
After responding to each one’s comment or query, you ask if they can direct you to the nearest door out of the room. You do this over and over, but nobody offers any helpful information. Most say they don’t know of any doors and apologize that they can’t help.
A few seem mildly put off by your question. They stare directly into your eyes for the briefest moment, as if you’re a puzzle they’d like to solve.
Only one person, a young woman wearing a straw hat, seems truly happy you asked the question.
“A door?” she says. “I can’t believe you asked me that. I’ve been wondering the same thing for years. If you find one, will you tap and let me know? I’d give anything to go outside for an hour.”
You begin to ask what makes her say that, but before you can finish, she’s interrupted by another woman tapping her from behind.
“Good luck!” she says, with a sweet smile and a wave. “Don’t forget me!”
You continue walking. Hours go by, and still no door. This is strange. Before you moved to the room, taking off used to be so simple. When you were a kid, your parents would pile the whole family in the car and drive out to the lake. You’d spend two weeks together there in an old cabin and not hear from anyone.
After college, when you were living in the city, you used to get away almost every weekend, grab a friend and head down to the beach or up to the mountains. It wasn’t complicated. Anyone could do it.
Finally, just when you’re about to give up, you come to a large hole in the wall. There are people milling around nearby, but they’re all turned away from the hole, as if they don’t know it’s there or know and don’t care.
It’s not exactly a door. It’s an arch-shaped opening about ten feet high by four feet wide, with a ledge running along the bottom at about thigh level. The ledge is deep and flat, perfect for someone to sit on and contemplate the view. There’s nobody sitting on it now.
You peer outward. The view isn’t what you imagined. You expected mountains and broad valleys with roads winding lazily through them—the vistas of happy vacations. But all you can see is a black backdrop decorated with tiny white twinkle lights, like the lights people in the room string on their Christmas trees for the holidays.
After a few minutes your eyes adjust, and you realize those aren’t twinkle lights at all. They’re stars! You’re looking out into space, the cosmos. It seems the room has broken free of the earth, the way a huge chunk of ice occasionally breaks off a glacier and floats away on its own. You remember reading about this once. They say the glacier has “calved.” What do they say when it happens to a big ro
om filled with people?
Your options are clear. You can turn around and go back to your personal zone, or you can step through the arch and see what happens.
The latter course is risky. Will you be able to breathe out there? Will you float pleasantly away from the room, or will it feel scary, more like falling?
Once outside, you’ll want to find your way back to Earth, and to do that you’ll probably need help. Will you meet others who have left the room before you and know the way?
It occurs to you that there’s a chance nobody has ever tried this before. If they had, wouldn’t you have heard something about it? News travels very quickly in the room.
As you’re pondering all this, you feel a tap on your shoulder. Normally you’d turn right around and answer it. But this time you hesitate. Part of you is curious to know who’s there and what he wants. Is it someone you know? A total stranger? But you’re so transfixed by the view, you can’t bear to turn away even for a moment. It’s the first time since moving to the room that you’ve totally ignored a tap. It feels wild and, somehow, right.
You climb up so you’re standing on the ledge, one hand holding the side of the arch for balance. You lean out a little to see what’s below. More stars, endless stars.
You sense movement beside you.
“I hope you’re not angry that I followed you,” says a voice you recognize. The woman in the straw hat is clambering up.
“Here,” you say, offering her your hand.
“Thank you,” she says, now on her feet. “I couldn’t resist. There’s nothing I want more than this.” She throws her arms out to the universe, like a singer belting out a song.
“Ready?” you ask, and she nods.
You close your eyes, bend your knees slightly, and leap!
Introduction
This book is about a yearning and a need. It’s about finding a quiet, spacious place where the mind can wander free. We all know what that place feels like, and we used to know how to get there. But lately we’re having trouble finding it.
Like the people in the story you just read, we live in a world where everyone is connected to everyone else all the time. We’re not literally in a room that’s floated away from the earth, but we’re definitely in a new place, and it’s technology that has brought us here. Our room is the digital space, and we tap each other through our connected screens.* Today we’re always just a few taps away from millions of other people, from endless information and stimulation. Family and friends, work and play, news and ideas—sometimes it seems everything we care about has moved to the digital room. So we spend our days there, living in this new ultra-connected way.
We’ve been at it for about a decade now, and it’s been thrilling and rewarding in many ways. When the whole world is within easy reach, there’s no end of things to see and do. Sometimes it feels like a kind of a paradise.
However, there’s a big asterisk to life in this amazing place. We’ve been doing our best to ignore it, but it won’t go away. It comes down to this: We’re all busier. Much, much busier. It’s a lot of work managing all this connectedness. The e-mails, texts, and voicemails; the pokes, prods, and tweets; the alerts and comments; the links, tags, and posts; the photos and videos; the blogs and vlogs; the searches, downloads, uploads, files, and folders; feeds and filters; walls and widgets; tags and clouds; the usernames, passcodes, and access keys; pop-ups and banners; ringtones and vibrations. That’s just a small sample of what we navigate each day in the room. By the time you read this there will be completely new modes of connecting that are all the rage. Our tools are fertile, constantly multiplying.
As they do, so does our busyness. Little by little, our workdays grow more crowded. When you carry a mobile device, all things digital (and all people) are along for the ride. Home life is busier too. Much of what used to be called free time has been colonized by our myriad connective obligations, and so is no longer free.
It’s easy to blame all this on the tools. Too easy. These tools are fantastically useful and enrich our lives in countless ways. Like all new technologies, they have flaws, but at bottom they can’t make us busy until we make them busy first. We’re the prime movers here. We’re always connected because we’re always connecting.
Beyond the sheer mental workload, our thoughts have acquired a new orientation. Of the two mental worlds everyone inhabits, the inner and the outer, the latter increasingly rules. The more connected we are, the more we depend on the world outside ourselves to tell us how to think and live. There’s always been a conflict between the exterior, social self and the interior, private one. The struggle to reconcile them is central to the human experience, one of the great themes of philosophy, literature, and art. In our own lifetime, the balance has tilted decisively in one direction. We hear the voices of others, and are directed by those voices, rather than by our own. We don’t turn inward as often or as easily as we used to.
In one sense, the digital sphere is all about differentiating oneself from others. Anyone with a computer can have a blog now, and the possibilities for self-expression are endless. However, this expression takes place entirely within the digital crowd, which frames and defines it. This makes us more reactive, our thinking contingent on others. To be hooked up to the crowd all day is a very particular way to go through life.
For a long time, there was an inclination to shrug all of this off as a mere transitional issue, a passing symptom of technological change. These are early days, we tell ourselves. Eventually, life will calm down and the inner self will revive. There’s a basic wisdom in this hopeful view. It’s never a good idea to buy into the dark fears of the techno-Cassandras, who generally turn out to be wrong. Human beings are skillful at figuring out the best uses for new tools. However, it can take a while. The future is full of promise, but we have to focus on the present, how we’re living, thinking, and feeling right now.
Like the two wayfarers in my story, a lot of us are feeling tapped out, hungry for some time away from the crowd. Life in the digital room would be saner and more fulfilling if we knew how to leave it now and then.
But can we leave? It’s nice to imagine that there’s a door somewhere and all you’d have to do is step through it and you’ll be in a different place. A less connected place where time isn’t so fugitive and the mind can slow down and be itself again. If someone told you that that place existed and he knew the way there, would you follow him?
What I’m proposing here 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.
THE BOOK BEGINS with a brief look at the essential conundrum: Our screens perform countless valuable tasks for individuals and for businesses and other organizations. They deliver the world to us, bringing all kinds of convenience and pleasure. But as we connect more and more, they’re changing the nature of everyday life, making it more frantic and rushed. And we’re losing something of great value, a way of thinking and moving through time that can be summed up in a single word: depth. Depth of thought and feeling, depth in our relationships, our work and everything we do. Since depth is what makes life fulfilling and meaningful, it’s astounding that we’re allowing this to happen.
We’ve effectively been living by a philosophy, albeit an unconscious one. It holds that (1) connecting via screens is good, and (2) the more you connect, the better. I call it Digital Maximalism, because the goal is maximum screen time. Few of us have decided this is a wise approach to life, but let’s face it, this is how we’ve been living.
There’s an emerging recognition that this approach is causing us all kinds of problems. We sense it in our everyday lives—the constant need to check the screen, the inability to slow down our thoughts and focus. It’s rampant at home, in school, and in the workplace. Various solutions have been proposed, ranging from behavioral regimens to software gadgets d
esigned to help manage the flow of information. They haven’t worked; the maximalist approach still rules.
What to do? Until recently, nobody has lived in a world of digital screens, so it would seem we are in uncharted territory. In fact, we’re not. Human beings have been connecting across space and time, and using technology to do it, for thousands of years. And whenever new devices have emerged, they’ve presented the kinds of challenges we face today—busyness, information overload, that sense of life being out of control.
These challenges were as real two millennia ago as they are today, and throughout history, people have been grappling with them and looking for creative ways to manage life in the crowd. We can learn a great deal from their experience and the practical ideas that emerged from it. Though this book opened with a futuristic allegory, its premise is that the best place to find a new philosophy for a digital world—the door to a saner, happier life—is in the past.
In part II, I look at seven key moments from history, eras much like our own in their great technological ferment and also great confusion. In each period, I focus on one thinker who was unusually thoughtful about the tools of the time, tools that in many cases are still in use today. Their names are well known—Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Franklin, Thoreau, and McLuhan—but their insights on this subject are less familiar.
Plato, for instance, shows that even in ancient Greece, people worried about what the latest technology was doing to their minds, and found ways to escape the crowd. Hamlet is one of literature’s best-known characters, but you may not know that Shakespeare gave the Prince of Denmark a hot gadget, a handheld device that was as fashionable in Renaissance England as iPhones and BlackBerrys are today. The Seven Philosophers of Screens, as I call them, provide a tour of the technological past, focused on the human questions confronting us today. What do you do when your life has become too outward and crowd-driven? How to quiet the busy mind? For me, just knowing that these issues have come up so often before, under such different circumstances, is comforting and inspiring.
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