I had a chance to see some genuine tables from the period at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. One of them, made in London within a few years of the debut of Hamlet, had the user instructions still intact (“To make cleane your Tables, when they are written on, Take a lyttle peece of Spunge…”). I could almost visualize it for sale at the front counter of a modern bookstore. Like these four-hundred-year-old tables, my Moleskines rely on old tools, handwriting and paper, that in a world of clicking keys and glowing screens are widely assumed to be nearly obsolete. Yet both are central to why this humble tool gives me a sense of mental order and control.
Unlike my screens, which thrust words, images, and sounds at me all day and night, my paper notebooks project no information at all. The pages are blank. They invite me to fill them with information, and when I do, it’s information of my own choosing that I write with my own hand. Crossing my front yard one morning, for instance, I remembered an obscure historical fact about Madagascar that I’d heard the day before and realized might be useful in a writing project I’ve got on the back burner. Out came the notebook, in went Madagascar. Having survived the winnowing processes of my consciousness, it had earned a spot on the page, and just the act of writing it down raised its profile in my thoughts. When you’re used to clicking keys all day, shaping letters one by one feels exotically earthy, memorable just by contrast.
Digital screens are tools of selectivity, too, but using them is more reactive, a matter of fending off and filtering. Because a paper notebook isn’t connected to the grid, there’s no such defensiveness. The selectivity is autonomous and entirely self-directed. I’m the search engine, the algorithm, and the filter. (Which is not to say it feels like hard work. Sometimes I just doodle.) Like tables, my notebooks are a pushback against the psychic burden of a newly dominant technology.
However, there’s an important difference. In the sixteenth century, when information was physically piling up everywhere, it was the ability to erase some of it that afforded a sense of empowerment and control. In contrast, the digital information that weighs on us today exists in a nonphysical medium, and this is part of the problem. We know it’s out there, and we have words to represent and quantify it. An exabyte, for instance, is a million million megabytes. But that doesn’t mean much to me. Where is all that data, exactly? It’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We’re physical creatures who perceive and know the world through our bodies, yet we now spend much of our time in a universe of disembodied information. It doesn’t live here with us, we just peer at it through a two-dimensional screen. At a very deep level of the consciousness, this is arduous and draining.
It’s a complex problem that my notebook addresses with utter simplicity. My first Moleskine purchase was driven largely by its tactile appeal. I wanted to feel it in my hands and flip its creamy pages with my fingers. I wanted to interact with it in ways in which I never get to interact with my screens. But the draw isn’t only sensuous; it’s also about physical presence.
In conventional thinking about technology today, the fact that paper is a three-dimensional medium—that it’s made of atoms rather than bits and therefore takes up space—is considered its great weakness. Like you and me, it has a body and is stuck here in the physical world. My notebook can’t fly from here to China in seconds the way digital data can. However, just as the strength of digital devices (their ability to bring the crowd closer) is also their weakness, the weakness of paper can be a strength.
Among researchers who study how humans interact with technology, there’s a theory known as embodied interaction, which says that three-dimensional tools are easier on the mind in certain important ways. This makes intuitive sense. Think of a screen with a dozen different documents open, all layered on top of one another, and what a pain it is try to organize and keep track of them all at once, using just your clicker and keyboard. Sometimes you want to reach in there and grab them, but you can’t. Reading and writing on screen, we expend a great deal of mental energy just navigating. Paper’s tangibility allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden, freeing the brain to think. Because a notebook has a body, it works more naturally with our bodies. At a time when movies and other screen experiences are striving for 3-D effects, paper is in one sense ahead of the curve.
In this high-speed era, another plus is the simple fact that my notebook isn’t connected to the electronic grid. It slows down information, gives it a resting place. The process of writing and thinking on screen has a wonderful lightness, a sense of constant changeability and evanescence. But sometimes you need to touch down. As the pamphlet that comes tucked into each Moleskine says, it’s a way “to capture reality on the move.” I can pull ideas not only out of my mind but out of the ethereal digital dimension and give them material presence and stability. Yes, you exist, you are worthy of this world. It doesn’t matter that the best of my notes will ultimately reside on my hard drive. The point is that before any of that happens, while the ideas are still cooking, I spend time with a tool that brings out the best in my mind. It may be an old tool, but, like a hinged door, it can do things that the new gadgets can’t.
What Hamlet’s tables and my notebooks share is this: each is an effective way of bringing an unruly, confusing world of stimuli and information under control. In Shakespeare’s time, it was the bedlam of the crowded city and the pressures of the emerging print culture. Today, it’s the bottomless inbox, the ringing cell phones, and just the weight of all that weightless digital stuff. Either way, the issue is overwhelming connectedness and the fundamental human need to work a little disconnectedness back into the equation.
Over and over in history, new technologies arrive that play to our natural maximalist tendencies. At the same time, quietly but persistently, there’s a need to find balance. The best solutions serve as a kind of bridge to the tech future, one that ensures that we’ll arrive with our sanity intact.
Stephen Greenblatt writes that one of the great achievements of Hamlet is its “intense representation of inwardness.” Shakespeare found a new way to capture real thought, what actually happens in the mind of an individual as he wrestles with a problem. Hamlet’s inwardness is the essence of the play’s power, and when he takes out his tables, inward is where he’s headed. Having received a jolt from the outward world (of which the ghost, being otherwordly, is a perfect representative), it’s where he needs to go. He says as much when he speaks about bringing order to “this distracted globe” by getting rid of all those other books, leaving only “the book…of my brain.” When he’s done setting down his thoughts about his terrible uncle, he puts his gadget away, saying, with new resolve, “So uncle, there you are. Now to my word.” In other words, back to the task at hand, his promise to seek vengeance.
Hamlet winds up having some trouble sticking to that task, of course, and things end badly for him. Who knows, perhaps if he’d used his tables a little more regularly—they never return for the rest of the play—it might have worked out differently.
Chapter Nine
INVENTING YOUR LIFE
Ben Franklin on Positive Rituals
“All new tools require some practice before we can become expert in the use of them.”
One idea for improving digital life that seemed promising from the start was no-e-mail Fridays. Businesses and other organizations had experimented with various versions of the concept before it drew wide attention several years ago, when numerous studies and media reports cited it as a possible answer to the problem of distracted, inefficient workers. Something had to be done, with the losses in productivity from information overload estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The notion was appealing because it was so simple: one day a week, everyone in an organization would disconnect from the inbox. This would lighten the mental burden, restore focus, and encourage face-to-face interaction. It echoed the casual Fridays that caught on in the workplace in the late nineties and changed
long-standing attitudes toward one aspect of office behavior, how people dressed. If it worked for clothing, why not for the screen? After a few months of ritualistically avoiding the inbox one day a week, it would become second nature. Workers would be able to ease off any time they needed a break, not just on Fridays. Problem solved.
Yet it hasn’t happened. Though there have been scattered reports of organizations successfully implementing such regimens, they have not been widely adopted or embraced. To the contrary, stories abound of workers either openly resisting the rules or covertly cheating. The hiatus is aimed at helping them, but they don’t seem to view it that way.
“Withdraw it even for a day, and some employees fight back like recovering smokers in a nicotine fit,” reported the Wall Street Journal. At one California technology company, a new e-mail moratorium had been in effect for less than fifteen minutes when a worker who normally sent hundreds of e-mails a day couldn’t take it any longer and fell off the wagon. “It’s kind of like speeding,” he told the newspaper. “You know there’s a law that says you’re not supposed to do it, but when you’re in the heat of combat, you aim and fire.”
The image speaks volumes, reflecting how digital technology has turned the workplace into a war zone for the mind. What ban-breaking workers effectively are saying is that they have no choice but to stay hunkered down in their foxholes. After all, just because management has established a no-e-mail day, that doesn’t mean e-mail stops arriving. So if you’re away from the screen for a whole day, you fall behind in your work, which nobody likes to do. And for many tasks e-mail really is the easiest, most efficient means of communication.
More broadly, this is how workers live now, at the office and everywhere else—always connected. And once in screen mode, it’s very hard to get out. It’s this digital inertia that’s responsible, at least in part, for the perpetual haze—and the poor work habits—employers are battling.
We’ve all been on the receiving end of this problem, whether it’s a customer service phone rep who has to be asked the same question three times or a retail store salesperson who abandons you for her handheld. You think: This company has to be crazy, to employ someone this unfocused. But this is the new normal. Distracted students sit in screen-lined classrooms half listening to distracted teachers. Drivers race through red lights and cross median strips, killing themselves or others, for the sake of getting out another text message. We take the fog of the war zone home with us and, by keeping one eye on the screen, ensure that it never lifts.
There’s a compulsive inevitability to the cycle and, in some pessimistic quarters, a fear that it can’t be broken. I’ve heard middle-aged people grumble that digital natives (those roughly thirty and under, who have grown up with screens) are effectively a new species of human being, innately incapable of holding a sustained conversation or thought. Homo distractus. This is the future, they moan, get used to it, as they sneak a glance at their own mobile.
Defeatism will only make these problems fester, when they don’t have to. The struggle of employers to impose some sanity on the e-mail burden is a reminder that, in the broad scheme of things, all digital technologies are still very new and we’re just in the early stages of figuring them out.
We take for granted how easy it is to use older devices, though many of them had long adjustment periods. When the telephone arrived in the late nineteenth century, it was widely viewed as a passive, one-way listening contraption. In Europe, phone service was initially marketed to the public as a way to enjoy opera and other live performances without attending in person. Of course, phones ultimately became a person-to-person device, but even then, how we use them has evolved over time. For much of the twentieth century, when the phone rang it was customary to drop whatever you were doing and answer it—people were slaves to the bell. In old movies, you know a businessman or some other high-powered character is way too busy when he’s shown speaking on two or more phones at once. When answering machines and voice mail came along several decades ago, it was a real advance in everyday life. And we’re still learning to live with phones. Lately the lapses in common sense and manners that characterized the early mobile phone years—people taking calls during Broadway shows—seem to be receding, a sign that we’re sorting out at least some questions.
But the learning curve never ends. With every new device, there are three categories of issues. First, the purely functional: What can this device do for us? What are its best uses? Second, the behavioral: Are there old behaviors I need to change or new ones I need to acquire in response to this? These are all exterior questions, but beneath the surface there’s a third category that’s often ignored, especially early on: the inner human dimension of technology: How is this device affecting me and my experience? Is it altering how I think and feel? Is it changing the rhythms of my day? Does life seem to be moving more quickly (or slowly) as a result of this gadget? Is it affecting my work? My home life? If so, are the effects good or bad?
These human issues are the ones that ultimately matter most, and it’s when problems arise in this area that we really begin to question the ways we’re using a technology and look for new approaches. True, big businesses began to worry about digital overload only when they saw it was costing them money. But the reason it showed up in the bottom line was an entirely human one: the minds of workers were off kilter. To ignore the interior is to set yourself up for trouble.
Since no-e-mail rituals are aimed squarely at the mind, why haven’t they worked? In fact, regimens of this kind are a solid idea, based on the age-old insight that rituals form good habits, which in turn are the foundation of a fruitful, happy life. Aristotle said it more than two thousand years ago: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” But simply engaging in a ritual—performing a given action at a certain time and/or in a particular way—is not enough. The transformative power of rituals is rooted in what they mean to the person performing them. In order to change a deep-seated, habitual behavior through ritual, the individual must believe that he or she needs to change. It’s about not just how but why. Inner change depends on inner conviction.
Nobody sheds light on this question better than Benjamin Franklin, who embodied all the qualities that no-e-mail Fridays and other well-intentioned digital diets seek to encourage. Franklin was a model of mental clarity and productivity, despite the fact that he lived an intensely busy life and was constantly juggling responsibilities and projects. And he was a great champion of rituals, which he used to fight his own worst tendencies and bring his overextended life under control. He attributed his many achievements in business, government, science, and other fields, and the contentment he enjoyed along the way, to one particular ritual that he developed early in life.
Today’s efforts to wean workers from the screen often assume that it’s possible to eliminate negative traits and tendencies just by imposing rituals from above. If everyone here at Acme Widget stops e-mailing on Fridays, we’ll all become less addicted to our inboxes. Franklin took a different approach: he identified not just the negative character traits he wanted to change but the positive, inward reasons why he wanted to change them. Only then did he begin modifying his behavior toward those ends, through a self-designed ritual. The conviction came first, and it made all the difference.
IN THE SUMMER of 1726, the twenty-year-old Franklin sailed home to Philadelphia from London, where he’d spent the last few years working in the printing business. Gutenberg’s technology was now nearly three hundred years old, and the confusion and class tension it had engendered in Shakespeare’s time were largely gone. Literacy was far from universal, but more widespread. Though Franklin came from a modest background—his father was a tallow chandler, a maker of candles and soap—he had grown up reading hungrily and gone into Gutenberg’s trade himself.
Franklin’s era was also different from those discussed in previous chapters in that it was not a time when a new connective technology was shaking up soci
ety and the mind. In the eighteenth century, people and their ideas moved through time and space largely by well-established means: on foot, on horseback, in carriages and ships; via messengers and mail services; and through print media, including newspapers, pamphlets, and books. The leading scientists of the time, including Franklin himself, would lay the groundwork for spectacular technologies to come, but those were off in the future.
If technology per se wasn’t bringing the crowd closer, it was a very busy time in other ways. Franklin’s life coincided with the Enlightenment, an age of great cultural and intellectual ferment that stressed the power of human reason to discover truths about existence, as opposed to relying on religion and the received wisdom of the past. Great thinkers such as Isaac Newton, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and Adam Smith were exploring bold new ideas in science, philosophy, politics, economics, and other fields. Among the results of this new thinking would be two revolutions, the American and the French. As a young man, Franklin eagerly waded into the outward sphere where this vibrant conversation was unfolding and stayed there, living the rest of his life essentially in public. Intensely gregarious by nature, he was drawn to the crowd and loathed being away from it and, in this way, very much a man of his age. “One of the fundamental sentiments of the Enlightenment was that there is a sociable affinity…among fellow humans,” writes his biographer Walter Isaacson, “and Franklin was an exemplar of this outlook.”
This is what makes his story valuable today. Even without a nudge from new technology, he had a persistent yen to connect that was very much like the one that drives us back to the screen and the busyness it delivers. He was constantly out and about doing the eighteenth-century equivalent of social networking. One of the pseudonyms Franklin used in his early years as a newspaper writer, the “Busy-Body,” described him perfectly.
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