Hamlet's BlackBerry

by William Powers

  Though the mirrors are just a metaphor for today’s predicament, they led Gutenberg to something much bigger and more directly relevant to the present. In his next venture, he took the same technological principles—a press, mass production—and applied them to written communication, which, as we’ve seen, had its own crowd problem. Just as there hadn’t been enough mirrors to satisfy popular demand, there weren’t enough books to go around. As a result, most Europeans didn’t have access to the inward experience that reading offered. Gutenberg rethought the technology of book production, developing a printing press with movable type that would allow books to be made more quickly and cheaply than they were made by hand. With his first printed text, a Bible with forty-two lines per page, he gave the world something wholly new: a machine-made book with a uniform text that could be reproduced with unprecedented efficiency. Over time, this would allow far more people to read by themselves in the private way that fosters inwardness.

  It was an immediate, smashing success. In 1455, some pages from Gutenberg’s first run of Bibles were shown at a trade fair in Frankfurt. A man who saw them named Enea Silvio Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) wrote a letter to a high-ranking cleric, reporting that this new kind of book was remarkably easy to use, seemingly flawless. But he wasn’t optimistic about getting his hands on one, because they were already a hit. “I shall try, as far as possible, to have one of these Bibles delivered for sale and I will purchase one copy for you,” he wrote. “But I am afraid that this may not be possible, both because of the distance and because, so they say, even before the books were finished, there were customers ready to buy them.”

  Not everyone was thrilled with Gutenberg’s creation. As today, there were pessimists and scolds who viewed new technology as a blight on civilization. In his recent book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, Robert Darnton quotes from a letter written in 1471 by an Italian scholar named Niccolò Perotti. Though he’d initially seen the printed book as a good thing, just a decade and a half into the print age, Perotti concluded it was a menace:

  I see that things turned out quite differently from what I had hoped. Because now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would best be forgotten, or, better still be erased from all books. And even when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.

  Like all great innovations, print spread quickly. As of 1480, there were presses operating in more than 120 European cities and towns. By 1500, this first wave of printers had churned out an estimated thirty thousand different titles and millions of copies. After centuries in which reading had been a largely outward, crowd-focused activity, the idea of having a book that one could read alone, in a completely interior fashion, turned out to be extremely powerful. Gutenberg had tapped into a hunger that was broader and deeper than anyone had anticipated.

  The desire to extend this experience more widely, and perfect it, produced yet more innovations. The earliest printed books were modeled on manuscripts, which meant they were large (ideal for displaying and reading to large gatherings), beautiful, and still quite expensive to produce. But printers soon realized that there was a need for cheaper, smaller books better suited to everyday people reading just for themselves. By the early 1500s, there were pocket-sized books with new typefaces that were easier on the eye, along with other reader-friendly innovations.

  The effects of this sea change in written communication were not strictly private, however, not by a long shot. In 1517, a German monk with some unorthodox theological ideas nailed his objections to various church policies and practices to a church door in Wittenberg and set off the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther had reached these views through his own reading and biblical scholarship, and over time print technology allowed his message to reach a wide audience of readers, who in turn would read of this dramatic challenge to ecclesiastical authority and decide where they stood. Gutenberg’s device played a crucial role in breaking the Church’s hold on power, and in the subsequent political and social changes that would shape the modern world. The values of freedom and equality that we cherish today took root through the spread of reading and the power it conferred on individuals to think for themselves.

  Of course, the book has many other strengths that have made it such a useful tool, and help explain why it has endured so far into the computer age. “[I]t has proven to be a marvelous machine,” Darnton writes,

  great for packaging information, convenient to thumb through, comfortable to curl up with, superb for storage, and remarkably resistant to damage. It does not need to be upgraded or downloaded, accessed or booted, plugged into circuits or extracted from webs. Its design makes it a delight to the eye. Its shape makes it a pleasure to hold in the hand.

  Does any of this make Gutenberg a philosopher? Not in the traditional sense. Little is known about the man himself, and there’s no evidence that he consciously set out to democratize reading. He was first and foremost a businessman or, as John Man puts it, “an early capitalist” who recognized there was money to be made in mass-producing Bibles. Nonetheless, it took a philosophical mind to step back from the challenges of the crowd in late-medieval Europe and come up with not one but two very different solutions. If Gutenberg had thought only of mass-producing the mirrors, we wouldn’t know his name today. If he’d thought only of the printing press, we would know his name but have less reason to surmise that he was consciously seeking solutions to the conundrum of the self in a crowded world. Because he had both ideas and worked at them so doggedly—he spent many years on the two ventures, borrowing money heavily along the way—it’s quite possible that he was pursuing not just profits but a genuine vision.

  And his work translates into ideas we can learn from today, when advertisements tout the “always-connected” life and influential technology critics praise new devices for the extent to which they broaden and speed up not just our reach but our availability, bringing the crowd ever closer in ever more dimensions of life.

  When my trusty notebook computer picks up a wireless Internet signal, it tells me I’m “Connected!” and the exclamation point leaves no doubt what that means: Good news! I’m in the crowd! When there’s no available signal, a red X appears over the wireless icon at the lower-right corner of my screen. There’s no exclamation point now because this is nothing to be gleeful about. The crowd is gone. For years, I responded to the red X with frustration and impatience, sometimes a whispered curse and a hand slammed on the nearest hard surface. I could feel the pulse pounding in my neck as my blood pressure rose. I was a good maximalist, and there was nothing worse than losing the crowd.

  I was wrong. I see that now, and I’m not the only one. It’s clear that a full-time outward-focused life is unproductive, unhealthy, and unhappy in manifold ways. If you never lose the crowd, the magic never happens. We need distance and gaps, and we need them on a regular basis. Yet we press on, oblivious. Lately there’s been an effort to make reading, the ultimate inward experience, more outward. Some e-reading devices allow you to toggle your attention back and forth between the text and the rest of the digital universe—the always-connected book. Enthusiasts of this approach predict that in the future all reading will be done effectively in public. That is, we’ll be navigating links, comments, and real-time messages from distant others even as we try to read, say, a terrific novel. In a way, that would be a return to the pre-Gutenberg era, when the crowd looked askance at solitary, silent readers.

  It’s a very good thing to have broad access to information, which is why libraries have always been so valuable, and the bigger the library, the better. For research purposes, this Google age is a wonder. But there’s a difference between access to information and the experience of it. Reading evolved away from the crowd for a reason: it wasn
’t the best way to read. Would anyone want to be trapped in a library in which all the books on all the shelves, and all the readers at all the desks, were talking out loud simultaneously? Hopping around among competing digital distractions, it’s impossible to go truly inward, to become immersed in reading to the point where the crowd falls away, an experience poet William Stafford captured nicely in the lines

  Closing the book, I find I have left my head inside.

  The point of the new reading technologies, it often seems, is to avoid deep immersion, precisely because it’s an activity the crowd can’t influence or control and thus a violation of the iron rule of digital existence: Never be alone. Deep, private reading and thought have begun to feel subversive. A decade ago, the digital space was heralded for the endless opportunities it offered for individual expression. The question now is how truly individual—as in bold, original, unique—you can be if you never step back from the crowd. When we think and write from within our busyness, surrounded by countless other voices, too often the result is reactive, derivative, short-shelf-life stuff.

  The greatest gifts one can give to the outward world lie within. To reach them, you have to go there.

  I’m not a technologist, so I can’t say exactly how the outward bias of today’s technologies might be changed. But the first step would be to adopt a different philosophical approach, one that acknowledges that in a busy, crowded world, less is more. That for many of life’s most important and rewarding tasks, inwardness isn’t just nice but essential. Perhaps on booting up, a digital device of the future might ask me how connected I want to be right now and offer various options, from alpha (less crowded, more focused) to omega (more crowded, less focused). If I chose alpha, it might then say “Choose one task” and not allow me to take on any others at the same time. A simplistic idea, perhaps, but then simplicity is what we need more of.

  We’re going to find it. Human beings are highly skilled at devising new ways to get away from the crowd. The recent past offers many examples. The Sony Walkman, the progenitor of today’s digital music players, made the formerly outward experience of music inward and private as well as portable. Video-recording devices such as TiVo liberated the television experience from the constraints of time. Suddenly, it was no longer necessary to watch your favorite show when everyone else was or to endure those often annoying features of crowd life, commercials. The better such innovations serve the needs of the harried self, creating distance and space where there once was none, the more handsomely they’re rewarded. Gutenberg’s name is synonymous with the technology past, but as a business philosopher, he points straight to the future. In the long run, the smart money is on inwardness.

  Chapter Eight

  HAMLET’S BLACKBERRY

  Shakespeare on the Beauty of Old Tools

  “Don’t worry,” Hamlet’s nifty device whispered, “you don’t have to know everything. Just the few things that matter.”

  Several years ago, I bought myself some Moleskines, the simple, unassuming notebooks that have become popular in the last decade. By chance, my eye fell on the display at the front counter of my local bookstore. In particular, the “plain journal” model, which is roughly the size of a passport with tan cardboard covers reminiscent of paper grocery bags, was calling out to me. On impulse, I grabbed a three-pack and added it to my haul.

  I’d been aware of the Moleskine phenomenon for years, ever since a globe-trotting journalist friend had shown me his. It was one of the classic larger models with pebbly black covers and an integral elastic band to keep it closed when not in use. The pages were filled with his lively handwriting and, scattered here and there, superb sketches of cats, people, and other subjects. The drawings were a surprise. I’d known this guy since we were teenagers and had never realized he had artistic leanings, let alone talent.

  He brushed off my compliments and focused on the notebook itself, which he said he couldn’t live without. After the original French manufacturer had gone out of business in the late 1980s, wherever his travels took him he would comb the local shopping districts and bazaars for stray leftovers. That could go on for only so long, he knew, and he was preparing himself for the worst when, seemingly out of the blue, in 1998 an Italian firm brought back the Moleskine brand. To hear him tell the story, it was as if humanity had finally discovered the key to happiness and it would be smooth sailing from here on.

  I opened the packet immediately, took one out, and held it. Though slender, it felt sturdy and substantial. The cardboard was a little fuzzy and faintly warm. I slipped it into my back right pocket, and I’ve had one there ever since. I pull it out at least a few times a day, to jot down ideas that come to me when I’m away from the computer I write on. Every other day or so, I look the notes over, cull the ones worth saving, and transcribe them into digital files. I also use the notebook for the occasional grocery list, driving directions, and other utilitarian tasks, but those scribbles go on the back pages, moving from the last page forward—a method Moleskine apparently had in mind, as the rear pages are perforated for easy tearing out. When the meaningful notes from the front meet the trivial ones from the back, it’s time for a new notebook.

  On the face of it, none of this makes much sense. In this seamlessly wired world, one can feel a bit loony toting around a stitched-together bundle of that dowdy, reportedly soon-to-be-obsolete tool, paper. There are so many more modern and efficient ways to record ideas and inspirations. For notes like mine that are headed for a hard drive anyway, it would be far more logical to go straight to digital, using a portable screen for the first step. Why bother writing them down by hand first? Another friend dictates thoughts he wants to remember into his smart phone, which automatically sends them as audio files to a transcription service. They’re speedily e-mailed back to him as text, with, he reports, remarkably few typos. He loves this system and proselytizes for it. When I take my notebook out in his presence, he smiles the way one smiles at a passing Model T. Look at that, isn’t it sweet?

  Yet sometimes I think I’m on the cutting edge and he’s stuck in the past. Just ten years ago, Moleskines were a rarity. Today I see them everywhere. When I’m using mine in public, someone nearby will often say, “You, too?” or “Aren’t you just crazy about those things?” For bonding with strangers, it’s almost as reliable as a baby or a dog.

  I’m a true believer, but for a long time I didn’t know why. What was it about this seemingly anachronistic tool that made me feel it was essential to my well-being? Why Moleskines, and why now? Their resurgence coincided exactly with the rise of digital connectedness, and my gut told me that the two must be related. But how? Was it just nostalgia, an effort to escape from the messiness of the present into the simplicity of an idealized past? Maybe paperphilia really isn’t so different from the recessive pinings that motivate some people to own antique cars. I wanted to think there was more to it than that.

  I found the answer in Renaissance England, of all places, with some help from that society’s greatest creative mind, William Shakespeare. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, London, where Shakespeare spent all his productive years and staged his plays, was a bustling, chaotic place. He and his contemporaries woke up each morning to a world as hectic and confounding in its own way as ours, and they found surprisingly inventive ways to cope. It was from one of their coping techniques that I came to see why, four hundred years later, it makes perfect sense that I find myself scribbling in vintage notebooks and feeling all the better for it.

  One of the first plays Shakespeare ever wrote, Henry VI, Part 2, is about a mob of illiterate peasants that lays siege to London in an uprising against the wealthy and powerful. Having taken an important nobleman prisoner, the rebel leader accuses him of various crimes, among them that he’s allowed printing presses to operate and spread knowledge of written language: “[T]hou hast caused printing to be used and…thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually
talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.”

  Far from seeing Gutenberg’s invention as a liberating force, these rebels view it as a tool of oppression. There are good reasons for this. When Shakespeare wrote this play around 1590, he was a young man recently arrived in London from the provincial town of Stratford-upon-Avon. For its time, London was a sprawling metropolis, the third largest city in Europe with a population approaching 200,000. As Stephen Greenblatt writes in his Shakespeare biography, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, he must have been stunned by “the London crowd—the unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling through the narrow streets, crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and churches and theaters…their noise, the smell of their breath, their rowdiness and potential for violence.”

  There was a palpable undercurrent of danger, too, and not just from street crime, the ever-present threat of plague, and other perils endemic to urban life in this period. This was also a politically unstable time and place. Ever since King Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church earlier in the century, England had been a pressure cooker of political tension, with power swinging back and forth between Protestants and Catholics, depending on who was on the throne. By the time Shakespeare turned up in London, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I had been ruling for many years, her regime always on the watch for Catholic dissidents and spies. Heads were being chopped off all the time, in some cases only to reappear later in a ghastly lineup on the gates of London Bridge. In The Prince and the Pauper, his novel of sixteenth-century London, Mark Twain describes this practice, noting that “the livid and decaying heads of renowned men impaled upon iron spikes” were put on display at the bridge as “object lessons” for passersby. Be careful, they said, or this could be you.