Hamlet's BlackBerry

I read Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building A Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers, because of the review at Sophisticated Dorkiness. And really, I don't know what I was expecting--something I didn't already know? Some kind of magic solution?

The book begins with a delightful analogy and goes on to identify the problem of busyness, which is that it's inevitable in a culture where "it's good to be connected, and it's bad to be disconnected." (If you don't believe that of our culture, think back to the last time you visited a parents' house, a hotel or a restaurant that didn't have a wireless connection.)

Although I believe that there are some problems with what he calls "the Vanishing Family Trick," I don't believe that parental authoritarianism, his recommended remedy, is the solution. As he points out in a later chapter on Ben Franklin, people have to see the positive in their resolution to give up something they want, and the children in his family, while they may like the parentally-mandated internet free weekends, as he asserts they do, have had it chosen for them; I'm assuming that they're younger than my teenagers.

I've recently been dealing with my teenage son's struggle for independence, and I'm trying hard to see his side--so hard that this book may have just come at the wrong time for me. It does affect my reaction to sentences like "my most cherished childhood memories, the ones that made me who I am and sustain me today, are about moments when a parent, grandparent, or somebody else I cared about put everything and everyone else aside to be with me alone...." which seems to me to be a version of the "only two choices" logical fallacy--either you spend this much time with someone without answering the call of electronic devices, or you give in to their lure entirely. Wouldn't teaching a kid good manners solve some a lot of these problems--you know, like talk to the people you're with rather than ignore them because of your phone? Powers does mention changes in the etiquette of telephone use: "for much of the twentieth century, when the phone rang it was customary to drop whatever you were doing and answer it....And we're still learning to live with phones."

The section in which Powers proposes we have something to learn about how to construct our own versions of the good life from Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Thoreau, and Marshall McLuhan seemed contrived and spun-out to me, as if a small, clever idea Powers came up with had been plumped and cosseted so it could stretch out to book length. He's dug up several references to an erasable "table" mentioned in Hamlet and asserts that "it played a central role in people's lives for hundreds of years and helped some of history's most brilliant minds organize their time and thoughts" while comparing its usefulness to that of his own moleskine notebook, and he's usefully inserted an interpretation of Walden back into the context of Transcendentalism. But I found nothing relevatory here.

Powers ends with some personal suggestions about how to live a good life amid a myriad of screens demanding some of our time and attention. One of them that I particularly like--because it's one I already do and it works well for me--is "to start using other people as your search engines....it's more enjoyable listening to the latest developments through the interpretive lens of a person you know, and it saves a lot of trouble."

Other suggestions I like less: "Have a disconnected party where all devices are confiscated at the door." Again, wouldn't good manners dictate that when you go to a party, you voluntarily put them away when you come through the door? Maybe where Powers lives it isn't considered rude to use electronic devices while visiting someone else's house, but where I live, unless you're a medical doctor on call, you're expected to be able to live without your devices for a couple of hours when the pleasure of your company has been requested.

This book inspires me to begin concluding my reviews with an audience recommendation. You could see this series building in my previous posts--one of my most urgent criticisms of Stanley Fish's book How To Write A Sentence was that I didn't think he had a very good idea of who he was writing it for, and the audience for Eleanor's Brown's novel was also a subject for my speculation. It seems like a good direction, to recommend the book based on who I think would most like to read it.

Who would most like to read Hamlet's Blackberry? Someone who would not think to pick it up. Someone who has never thought about designing a "philosophy for building a good life" but who lives from moment to digital moment, rarely reading a printed book. Someone who would text in the theater (and surely there's a special circle of hell for those folks).