HAMLET’s BLACKBERRY
A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age
by William Powers
Scribe, 267pp.
Reviewed: 9 October, 2010
Australia’s minority Federal Government owes the support of key independents due to its commitment to roll out a national broadband network. Few voters know what this really means and what difference it may make, but enough of us apparently believe that connectedness is inherently a good thing, and the more the better. But is it?
William Powers is a journalist and media critic who lives on (and in) the world of digital connectedness, but sees peril in a life that is continually distracted by the beeps, flickers and tweets issuing from our always-on smart-phones, portable screens, and email alarms.
He has recognized that addiction to connectedness can seduce willing victims of E-harassment with demands for attention from workplace, from well-meaning friends, and compulsive participation in spurious “social networks” that feed on a false sense of artificial community.
But Powers is no I-phobe. He recognizes the enabling powers of modern communications technology in every personal and public sphere. The issue, as in every instance of a powerful new tool, is to winnow the useful applications from the purely wasteful and the actively harmful. It is for the individual user to work out how much connectedness actually contributes to what philosophers call “the good life”.
It’s always useful to be reminded that we are not the first generation to experience dramatic shifts in our modes of communication. Powers tracks human social development through a series of inventions that challenged the balance between social communication and personal introspection. Without time for introspection and intimate conversation, unmediated by technology, an individual cannot attain “the good life”.
Zoologists might challenge his assertion that humans “invented” conversation. My garden right now is full of currawongs and wattlebirds jabbering meaningfully at each other, and it’s not for me to dismiss what communications organize the complex economy of an ants’ nest. But I do accept that they are unlikely to be discussing Plato.
Powers starts his philosophers’ chronicle with reference to Plato’s account of Socrates’ conversation with the disciple Phaedrus. The point is not what they were talking about, but the fact that Phaedrus had to persuade Socrates to take a walk outside the city of Athens to a place where they would not be interrupted. Socrates, with a career based on conversation, was addicted to the bustle and chance encounters of the Athenian agora – to being “always on-line”. Yet once forced off-line to a rural walk and uninterrupted conversation with one individual, he acknowledged feeling significantly refreshed.
The tale of “Hamlet’s Blackberry” is a wonderful piece of Shakespearian exegesis. At one point Hamlet, trying to clear the “distracted globe” of his mind, declares:
Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records…
And later, when struck by something he wants to remember..
My tables – meet it is I set it down..
The “Tables” was a new invention – a pocket notebook with erasable pages, all the rage among Elizabethan early-adopters and popular right through to the nineteenth century. I would have called it “Hamlet’s early Palm Pilot” because it lacked the network connectivity that defines Blackberry devices. But Powers’ point here is that Shakespeare links Hamlet’s distracted mind with an obsessive collection of “trivial fond records”, just because he possesses the device that enables this collection.
Powers may be something of a modern Transcendentalist. He lives the writer’s life with wife, child and pets in a converted barn on Cape Cod, within the ambit of Thoreau’s famous 1845 experiment of mindful withdrawal from social connectedness, at Walden Pond near Concord.
He reminds us that Thoreau’s deliberate isolation was far from absolute. Visitors were frequent and the supposedly self-sufficient cabin was in direct line of sight to the new steam railway linking Concord to the world at breakneck speed. With some foresight, Thoreau also suspected that a planned telegraph link to Europe would be used mainly to fill Americans’ heads with celebrity gossip.
Powers’ “Practical Philosophy” for controlling digital distraction turns out to be rather elementary, but realistic. It’s based on turning gadgets off at regular periods. His epiphany came after accidentally drowning a mobile phone in the sea and experiencing anxiety followed by a strange relief. He now takes his family on holiday to places that offer no Internet connection, for a collective cold turkey on connectedness.
I assume Will Powers is his real name – it is a good one for a recovering connectaholic.
The arguments here follow well-worn themes about extraversion, introversion, self and society, applied to the current context of connectivity enthusiasm – what he calls “digital maximalism”. As so often, the choice is not binary, but of individual balance.
Reading a good book is excellent therapy for the over-connected, and this work is an intelligent contribution to the library. Best to be read on paper.
Richard Thwaites once worked in the National Office for the Information Economy and pursues a good life, cautiously connected, in Canberra.