Yesterday I helped my sister activate her new Blackberry. Bye-bye to her pink Razr phone. Just after taking some responsibility for placing her in the "always on" mode I happened to read in the Wall Street Journal David Harsanyi's review of Hamlet's Blackberry by William Powers. I'll let his review and the one from Publisher's Weekly be screen reading for you. Me, I have to escape from the digital devices to find time to read the book. Or I should say, "the rest is silence."
From Publishers Weekly
Our discombobulated Internet Age could learn important new tricks from some very old thinkers, according to this incisive critique of online life and its discontents. Journalist Powers bemoans the reigning dogma of digital maximalism that requires us to divide our attention between ever more e-mails, text messages, cellphone calls, video streams, and blinking banners, resulting, he argues, in lowered productivity and a distracted life devoid of meaning and depth. In a nifty and refreshing turn, he looks to ideas of the past for remedies to this hyper-modern predicament: to Plato, who analyzed the transition from the ancient technology of talking to the cutting-edge gadgetry of written scrolls; to Shakespeare, who gave Hamlet the latest in Elizabethan information apps, an erasable notebook; to Thoreau, who carved out solitary spaces amid the press of telegraphs and railroads. The author sometimes lapses into mysticism—In solitude we meet not just ourselves but all other selves—and his solutions, like the weekend-long Internet Sabbaths he and his wife decreed for their family, are small-bore. But Powers deftly blends an appreciation of the advantages of information technology and a shrewd assessment of its pitfalls into a compelling call to disconnect. (July)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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