one of our local newspapers: Mary Ann Bragg, “Modernist Makeover in Wellfleet,” Cape Cod Times, January 2, 2010.
Further Reading
This book grew out of an essay that I wrote several years ago as a fellow at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Also called “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” it’s about the past, present, and future of one particular tool of human connectedness, paper. The essay is available online at my Web site, www.williampowers.com.
For readers who want to explore further the ideas discussed in this book, below is a list of books that were useful to me in my thinking and research. Not all are mentioned in the foregoing chapters and I don’t agree with all of the authors’ ideas and conclusions. But for one reason or another, I found each of these books worth reading.
PHILOSOPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE
Botton, Alain de. The Consolations of Philosophy. New York: Vintage, 2001.
Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 1995.
James, William. On Some of Life’s Ideals. Two lectures by James published together in book form during his lifetime. The first, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” explores the challenge of finding “vital significance” in one’s daily life. There are various paperback reprints of the book, and the text of this beautiful lecture can also be found online.
Richards, M. C. Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.
AUTONOMY AND SOLITUDE
Lindbergh, Anne Morrow. Gift from the Sea. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005.
Newman, Mildred, and Bernard Berkowitz, with Jean Owen. How to Be Your Own Best Friend. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986.
Storr, Anthony. Solitude: A Return to the Self. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.
TOOLS AND PEOPLE
Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000.
Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. New York: HarperTorch, 2006.
Sellen, Abigail J., and Richard H. R. Harper. The Myth of the Paperless Office. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.
PHILOSOPHY OF HOME DESIGN
Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
PLATO
Cooper, John M., ed. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997.
SENECA
Seneca. Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, selected and trans. with an introduction by Robin Campbell. London: Penguin Books, 2004.
On Stoicism
Aurelius, Marcus. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Widely available in paperback and online.
Epictetus. Epictetus: Discourses and Selected Writings, trans. and ed. Robert Dobbin. London: Penguin Books, 2008.
On Concentration
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
Gallagher, Winifred. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
GUTENBERG
Man, John. Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
On Books and Reading
Basbanes, Nicholas A. A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Darnton, Robert. The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009.
Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996.
SHAKESPEARE
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
FRANKLIN
Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography. Widely available.
Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
THOREAU
Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers. New York: Berkley, 1999.
Thoreau, Henry David. The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, ed. Odell Shepard. New York: Dover, 1961.
———. Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, ed. Bradley P. Dean. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
———. Walden, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Nota Bene, 2006.
MCLUHAN
Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
———. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.
Twentieth-Century Thought on Crowds
Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.
Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York: Perennial Classics, 2002.
Riesman, David, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Nota Bene, 2001.
Post-McLuhan Thought on Technology and People
Freeman, John. The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. New York: Scribner, 2009.
Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Shenk, David. Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. New York: HarperOne, 1998.
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.
Acknowledgments
Having written so many words about autonomy and self-sufficiency, I have a confession to make: I could not have done this without the help of some wonderful organizations and people. I first began thinking about these ideas in the fall of 2006, when I was lucky enough to spend a semester as a fellow at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. This book was born of that happy experience. My thanks to Alex Jones, Tom Patterson, Nancy Palmer, Edie Holway, and everyone at Shorenstein for the chance to explore and the unwavering support.
I first learned about Hamlet’s tables at a marvelous exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., where Gail Kern Paster and Heather Wolfe have since helped me in more ways than I can count.
The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, allowed me to spend many productive hours among its rich resources and quiet spaces.
In the fall of 2008, I spent three weeks at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, thinking, writing, and enjoying the company of terrific people. The friendships and encouragement I found there sustained me long afterward. At a time when striking a healthy balance between solitude and community is such a challenge, MacDowell could be a role model for the world.
When the book was still a work in progress, I was honored to speak at the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard, a special place run by a special person, Christina Davis.
This project really began with Dan Okrent, whose support, insights, and friendship have carried me through. Many thanks to Christopher Chabris, Katy Chevigny, Rob Corrigan, Jeffrey Cramer, Tony Horwitz, Walter Isaacson, and Elsa Walsh for reading all or part of the manuscript and offering thoughtful suggestions and comments.
For advice, instruction, conversation, leads, and other kindnesses, I’m grateful to Nicholas Basbanes, Claudia Bedrick, Clara Bingham, Emily Bingham, Dan Bloom, Janis Brennan, Geraldine Brooks, Flip Brophy, David Del Tredici, Bryan Dickson, Tom Djajadiningrat, Nora Gal
lagher, Howard Gardner, Terry Hanrahan, Asa Hopkins, Sharon Howell, Maxine Isaacs, John Jackson, Constance Kremer, Don Krohn, Becky Okrent, Kees Overbeeke, Julie Piepenkotter, Moin Rahman, Stephen Reily, Samara Sit, Sally Bedell Smith, the Spiegel and Luddy families, Barbara Feinman Todd, Helen Miranda Wilson, John Wolcott, Maryanne Wolf, Tim Woodman, Bob Woodward, and Theo Zimmerman.
Thank you to Jonathan Burnham at Harper Collins, for believing in this idea from the start.
My editor, Gail Winston, is a writer’s dream: wise, sensitive, and steadfast. She was a joy to work with and learn from. Any strengths that might be found in these pages are there because Gail pulled them out of me.
To Jason Sack, thank you for great deadline patience and many other assists.
My agent, Melanie Jackson, watched over me as I felt my way through the unfamiliar country of book writing. I could not have asked for a better guardian.
Thank you to my parents and everyone in my family, near and far, and all the friends and neighbors who cheered me on. Your faith in me means more than I can say.
Finally, to Martha and William, thank you for your unflagging support, your inspirations and edits, your sense of humor about all those late nights, and, above all, your love. You are my everything.
About the Author
WILLIAM POWERS, a former staff writer for the Washington Post, has written about media, technology, and other subjects for a wide variety of publications, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and McSweeney’s. This book grew out of research he did as a fellow at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. A two-time winner of the Arthur Rowse Award for media criticism, he lives on Cape Cod with his wife, author Martha Sherrill, and their son. This is his first book.
www.williampowers.com
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Credits
Jacket photograph © India Today Group/Getty Images
Jacket design by Jarrod Taylor
Copyright
HAMLET’S BLACKBERRY. Copyright © 2010 by William Powers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200287-7
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* I use the word “screens” here and throughout the book as shorthand for the connective digital devices that have been widely adopted in the last two decades, including desktop and notebook computers, mobile phones, e-readers, and tablets.
* In some states I would have been breaking the law by making a phone call while driving. I made the call in Massachusetts, where at the time that I wrote this book, it was still legal, though probably not safe.
* Nero’s descent into corruption and depravity came later, after Seneca had been removed from power.
* There are societies, notably Japan, where sliding doors have long been popular.
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