Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; William Powers: Hamlet's Blackberry

Everybody can get started. Good evening my name is Mike. On behalf of our bookstore I thank off coming. I welcome you to our event with William Powers. Before we get started I want to mention just a few of the bookstore's upcoming events next Tuesday novelist Howard Norman will read from his new book what is left of the daughter. They'll be here in the store at 7:00 it is free next Wednesday mail Malloy will read from his short story collection both ways is the only way I want it. That room will also be in the store seven it is also free and we still have tickets available for our event on Monday August 2nd with Carl Hiaasen reading will be at the Brattle Theater at 6 p.m. Tickets are $5 you can buy those at the registers for more information on these and other upcoming hard bookstore events please do pick up a summer events flyer by the information desk or you can always go online to Harvard dot com for full listings. Ask you to turn off or silence your cell phones iPhones Blackberries if you have those with you. Tonight I am excited to welcome William Powers our bookstore to discuss his book Hamlet's BlackBerry

a practical philosophy for building a good life in the in the digital age. Mr. Powers is a former staff writer for The Washington Post. His writings also appear in the Atlantic the New York Times New York magazine The Guardian and other publications. He is a two time winner of the National Press Club. Arthur rouse award for American media commentary. And he is a former Shorenstein fellow. I should also thank the sorry sorry I should also thank the Shorenstein Center for Press Politics and Public Policy for co-sponsoring tonight's event in Hamlet's BlackBerry Mr. Powers offers advice for enriching our inner and interpersonal lives in todays super connected digital age. After showing that current concerns about the negative impact of new technology on our lives or not on precedence it Mr. Powers outlines his own approach to balancing the need to connect with the need to contemplate. The Wall Street Journal said of the book even a jaded reader is likely to be won over by Hamlet's BlackBerry and the New York Times said Powers

ruminations are penetrating his language clear and strong and historical references are restorative. We'll follow Mr. Powers discussion with a question answer session will end with the book signing right here at this table. Copies of Hamlet's BlackBerry are available to purchase up at the registers and I think those of you who do purchasable tonight by doing so you're supporting a local independent bookstore and this author series for which we're very grateful. So join me in welcoming William Powers. Thank you. Thanks very much thanks to everybody for coming. Or is this a little bit. You know that's good. Thanks. Well I want to say that I'm so happy to be here. I've been touring for a couple weeks now. Buncha cities west coast and now the East Coast this is my last stop. And it's really perfect because this is really coming here is really a homecoming for me for a bunch of reasons I live in Massachusetts I live out on Cape Cod. But more to the point with this book it really

began here in Cambridge. The Shorenstein Center is not just the co-sponsor of this event it's the place where the whole idea really started. I had a wonderful semester here looking at one piece of the puzzle that I talk about in the book and that grew into the book and it was really the support of the wonderful people assurance team one of whom I see in the second row here that really made it possible so. So it's great to be back where really the book was born. Speaking of the Shorenstein Center I had a few hours before coming here tonight a few free hours between. I had done a radio interview and I had this event and I have another radio interview tonight and I had this rare break in the book tour madness. And I remembered this little space next to the building that the Shorenstein Center is in there sort of a path between Shorenstein and the Charles Hotel complex. And some of you probably know what I don't think I'm like many spaces around Cambridge and Harvard I don't think it actually has a name

or have been endowed by anybody. It just is this kind of walk. And it's lovely it has these big trees it's kind of dark which sort of adds a charm to it in the summer. And I went there just to sit and think about what I was going to say tonight I sat on a bench and. It was funny I noticed I did something that I've been doing for at least a decade and that we all seem to do is the second I sat on the bench for this quiet time I've reached in my pocket for my mobile and took it out. Without even realizing why I took it out thinking I was going to do something with it thinking something was going to come in some call or whatever and I held it in my hands for a few minutes and I started to watch the people go by walking on bikes. It's a really nice spot. People with strollers with babies and I noticed as you do notice today that a really high percentage of the people walking by were either on a device talking or you know using their thumbs to taxed or they were just holding it like I was sort of waiting for the next summons from the beyond

and watching them and then noticing the few exceptions who came by the few people who really didn't have any digital gadget in their hand were you might say disconnected sort of inspired me to both turn mine off and put it back in my pocket. And I realized looking at those exceptions there was one woman. Kind of young woman walking along with a sort of spring in her step carrying a couple notebooks in her hand and God knows where she was going she had to but she had a reckless throwing shirt on. Then there was a dad one of the dads with one of the strollers did not have a BlackBerry in his hand which was very nice. I noticed that that person without the gadget that sight of that person disconnected has become a kind of extraordinary really a singular sight singular in two senses of the word. In our world today and it's even taken on a kind of a static quality it's so unusual that you sort of marvel at it and think gosh I don't see that anymore. It's almost become to me like you know that first sight of

Yosemite Valley or Mt. Everest or something it's like wow that is really that is really an exception to the landscape. And yet what's interesting about that person who's disconnected is that you know I think in the cultural atmosphere in which we have been living for some time we haven't been paying much attention to that person state and or thinking about the degree to which each of us is in it or not in it sort of being conscious of the value if any of that state of being without a gadget or with the gadget turned off in a sense I think we've been leaving that idea behind that that person represents and that's sort of behind what I decided to try and tackle in the book which takes me back to where the book began. When I had this great opportunity to be here at the Shorenstein Center several years ago for a semester to study really anything I wanted related to the media. The topic I proposed was to look at one tool

of connectedness. A very old tool that I sort of felt like the person walking without a gadget was being sort of forgotten and left behind and that was paper. I decided to spend a semester studying paper and this assumption that paper was dying which actually at the beginning of the semester when I started this project I kind of bought into that idea I sort of thought it must be true it's completely logical were about to say goodbye to paper media and they've been really you know completely replaced by screens. And in fact as Nancy will remember I named my project at the outset the death of paper based on that assumption. I spent those three months here three and a half months looking back at the past at the history of both the tool that is paper which is about 2000 years old and other technologies sort of the history of human connectedness. And I wound up actually changing my mind. I wound up concluding that. That often is the case that old tools that we assume are going to die when a new one comes along that supposedly going to replace them don't die. That they're

often not replaced that they live on because they have these an acknowledged initially unacknowledged strengths or that they take on new roles. And I concluded based on a lot of factors that I'm not going to recount here because it would take too long. That paper has all these strengths that are actually in some ways becoming more valuable the more connected we get by digital screens. Some of them are cognitive psychological emotional Some of them have to do with just the three dimensional nature of paper and the fact that we can hold it in our hands and feel it with our fingers it seems like a seemingly trivial thing but it actually isn't trivial as a lot of research suggesting that embodied tools tools that are three dimensional like us are easier on the mind in certain ways than screens and digital screens are. So I wrote this up and concluded that paper will endure in some fashion forever really. And I subbed I called the essay Hamlet's BlackBerry

because I had touched on a moment in Shakespeare in the essay why paper is eternal which is sort of a provocative. Title I later learned when people started writing about it. It got some nice attention in the media and people were downloading it and reading it on the Shorenstein website and I got some offers from publishers to turn it into a book sort of some feel if you want to just expand this essay into a book about paper. And I concluded two things on a practical level I concluded that a book specifically about the future of paper would have about 100 readers and but on a much more important level I felt that I had sort of said my piece about that subject and that there was a much larger question that I might be able to look at in a book which is what I call in the book the conundrum of connectedness. This larger issue of all the wonderful benefits we're getting from digital devices which are so manifest so many and so manifest every day it's hard to even sort of begin a list to describe all the things we get from being able to reach out to so many people so much information so easily

with a few touches of a keypad it's stunning it's still stunning to me two decades into this age this digital age that we can do all those things. That's one side of the conundrum the good side. But I think in recent years there's been a downside that's been emerging. And it was that that made this a conundrum and it made me want to explore it in a book. The downside being to put it as simply as possible that all this connectedness all this wonderful connectedness is just making our lives busier and more crowded and more hectic. And not leaving us what i call one point of the book stopping places for the mind places where we can sort of do what I was doing and that pathway today sit on that bench and reflect and make sense of our connectedness take it inward. You know when we connect we're basically reaching outward and living what philosophers for centuries have called the outward life but they've also emphasized the inward life and the importance of the two being in balance. And I had a

hunch that. They are our inner life was out of balance was being somewhat overlooked in the enthusiasm about digital technology and they also had a hunch that it might be useful having spent that time at Shorenstein looking at the past it might be useful to go back into the past again for this larger question. I felt that in the contemporary landscape there weren't any answers to this question that were really useful to me. There were two schools of thought in the books and articles that are written about sort of the challenges of Digital Life and digital life generally. On the one side there's sort of the technophiles the people who write these books these kind of cheerleading books about where remaking the world and and it's all fantastic and they're actually right you know those books are correct we are remaking the world and it is wonderful. Those techno writers tend to write for each other. I have found in language that is often kind of hard to penetrate for the rest of us. And they also don't seem to be aware of

or care much about the downside that I was facing. On the other side of it the other part of the dialogue that's been taking place for years now is the people who can't bear the devices who think civilization is coming apart our brains are being destroyed and so forth by digital technology which I also don't find sympathetic. I just don't think that is the end of the world because we've learned to connect better. I think it's really the beginning of a great new chapter and we just need to figure out a smart strategy for Kinect for using these technologies. So I did what a lot of writers have done with their first book this is my first book hopefully not my last. I decided to write the book that I wanted to read that nobody had written which is kind of examining this conundrum for the rest of us. For those of us who are not in either camp which I had a hunch was actually most people. So having been frustrated with the contemporary landscape I looked into the past. I started reading a lot of thinkers from different points in history when technology was

changing the landscape of everyday life and got all kinds of recommendations from friends. I really cast a wide net and I read lots of people. At one point I spent a lot of time it was funny the project sort of kept taking me back to Cambridge for some reason it was like there's this energy under the sidewalk here that was connected to my to my book. At one point I spent a lot of time in the 19th century reading three people who were really interconnected in their lives and in their thinking. Emerson Thoreau and William James and I kept coming across these fantastic moments in all three of those thinkers that I also had to wonder was it all because they lived in Cambridge and somehow got this the same juice that I got. I didn't wind up using them all. Focusing on them all three of them in the book but there was one moment in you know as you all know I think Emerson throw in James all kind of had this overriding theme about the significance and the

potential of the self apart from the crowd really an emphasis on this kind of this inner power that we all have that we need a little distance to tap into. And there was this wonderful moment that I came across in Emerson that maybe some of you will recognize is from one of the essays I can remember which were he's actually just talking about his state of mind one random day walking around along I don't know if it was in Cambridge or Concord or where it was but he wrote crossing a bare common in snow puddles at twilight under a clouded sky without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune. I have enjoyed a special good exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. I love that moment I specially love him his adding that little. Brink of fear at the end to remind you that he's not just writing about something that was all pleasure but I also love it because he was just writing about one of these empty moments when he wasn't doing anything in particular when you might say in our terms he wasn't connecting He wasn't stimulating himself he was just walking along.

And yet it had this enormous power. And then not long after that I was reading William James an essay about how to find its incredible essay that had a great impact on me called on a certain blindness in human beings. And it's about how difficult it is sometimes to recognize what it is in other people that makes their life significant and how we tend to wall ourselves off from other people so not only do we not tap into that inner self but we prevent ourselves we put up these walls that make it almost impossible to see that inner significance. And I'm reading along in William James and he quotes that very sentence in Emerson about crossing the bare common and that incredible ability of members and to see vital significance in these moments that others would overlook because they seem empty. It may be significant that Emerson was William James his godfather. So maybe he

maybe he read him more closely than most people but anyway I loved all the synergies between those. Those writers I wound up choosing seven moments in the past that I thought had interesting parallels to today. The moments generally six out of the seven were moments when society was adjusting to some new technology and sort of having trouble adjusting to it. When people were facing a challenge they reminded me of this conundrum they were facing wonderful benefits new burdens and downsides How do you reconcile them. And I chose for each of those moments one thinker who seemed to have unusual practical. I don't usually practical ideas that we could apply to our own lives. So of the three I mention for example I focused on Thoreau because Thoreau is sort of like Applied Emerson in a way. And William James is is wonderful but completely abstract and theoretical and very hard to do when you come away from reading him it's hard to say sort of what you got out of it even though it's really

important. But with the row it's right there it's in everyday life and that's what I wanted in this book that's why it's called a practical philosophy. So just a couple examples of. I started with Plato and the birth of the alphabet and I used the wealth famous dialogue. PHAEDRUS which is about Socrates and his young student taking a walk outside Athens and putting some space between themselves and the busy life of the city to have a conversation. Socrates is very sceptical about the value of leaving the city he hates to leave behind his so-called What I would call his Connected Life. In the aural sense of the word conversation conversation he believed was of course the great route to wisdom. But his friend convinces him to take this walk and they have a conversation for the ages and I use that to talk about the simple principle of putting a little distance between yourself and the crowd. Moving ahead to the Roman Empire I focused on Seneca. A philosopher

who I hadn't really read before I worked on this book and who I think has been kind of cast aside in the last hundred years or so I think he used to be actually really widely read and he's now known as a source of a couple aphorisms and that's about it. And I found Seneca to be an incredible treasure trove of writing and thought that I could actually like sit up in bed and not be able to sleep I was so engrossed in some of his history his writing that I felt like it was written 2000 years ago but last week he talks about. Seneca was a very busy man he was effectively the Emperor of Rome for five years under Nero when Nero was too young to rule. And Seneca was basically running the empire and he was also a thinker and he talks about the challenge in that busy busy area of Rome when information was sort of cascading down on people through this wonderful new medium of books and written language which was only 400 years old at that point. And he talks about how his friends and colleagues had such a horrible time feeling like they could never keep

up with all the information could never get ahead of it. It was almost as if the burdens of connectedness were chasing them everywhere they went. And he refers to it at one point as the restless energy of the hunted mind. I love that phrase because it has these two elements that I think we're experiencing today the restless energy that inability to kind of settle down to want to move to another task another task sort of like the finger on the clicker. And then the hunted mind the feeling of being pursued by the in-box that I feel all the time these days. Another example of a thinker I look at is the one who gave us the title gave me the title Shakespeare and I focus there on a moment of Hamlet that I talked about in the in the essay I wrote for the Shorenstein Center. But I come at it in a slightly different way talking about a gadget was very popular in Shakespeare's time called the table which was a little sort of booklet that people started carrying around it when you open the covers. It had us a surface made of plaster that you wrote on with a stylus a metal stylus like the stylus

we have with some of our gadgets today. And the beauty of the table was that you could erase it in the evening you could take notes all day do your to do list things you want to remember and then wipe it clean very easily which was a complete innovation. People became so dependent on their tables in Renaissance Europe that they'd Montane and other people other writers wrote in their journals and in their letters that they couldn't go anywhere without them. They were completely hooked really on their tables and Shakespeare gives one in Hamlet to him with himself when he first sees the ghost of his father and it's sort of inundated with this barrage of information that he doesn't know what to do with learning that his father was murdered rather than killed by a serpent. He says suddenly my tables my tables. He reaches for the gadget and he takes it out and expressly says that he's using it to clear the clutter from this distracted globe by which he means his his head although he's also punting on the word I'm referring to the Globe Theater where the where the play would have taken

place suggesting perhaps that people in his time were suffering from ADT just as we are. Anyway that example is sort of I use it for a couple of different reasons but. But the primary reason is to show that people have been through this cycle before with technology both coming along and changing their lives and presenting these challenges and also providing answers. In this case a new technology that really helps people deal with overload. The final example is the Raul who as I said I chose from those three 19th century thinkers that I loved and I kind of try and do a little corrective exercise with who we think of as the guy who ran away from society and was really an escapee. But but I mean reading quite a bit about Thoreau and reading him again and by the way I couldn't stand it when I read it in college but I pull I pulled out my old through all of that I read here at Harvard and my 20 something year old marginal notes were all completely negative I wrote in the margins

pretentious stupid. And then I came back to him in my 40s. And. And I just saw this in wonderful new view I got this wonderful new view of Thoreau I realized that he wasn't really running away from the crowd he built his cabin on the periphery of Concord It was a short walk away. The railroad one of the great symbols of connectedness had just been built from Concord to Boston and it ran right by Walden Pond and as you probably know it still does today. And he actually writes in while there's all these passages about all the company he kept in the entertainer he did in the in the cabin at one point he entertained as many as 30 people. Well I think what I wanted to people to know about throughout was that what he was actually trying to do was not run away but conduct an experiment about how to offset the intense connectedness of one's life in the modern world with a little disconnected this bring some of this balance opened up some gaps between himself and the crowd so he could have these kinds of moments and an inner life a rich inner life like the one I'm talking about I'm trying to talk about in the book as an

important value that we seem to be leaving behind. The other thing that's great about the row is there's this wonderful moment where he talks about how addicted people were to the post office to going to the post office. And it's not that well-known because it's not in Walden. It's in one of his speeches that later was turned into an essay. And I love this passage I'm just going to read this to you. He talks about people who were addicted to their connectedness and that age. He doesn't use that phrase connectedness but that's what he's talking about wind up sort of skating the surface of life living superficially never going deep. And he talks about what happened sort of when they run into each other. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private conversation degenerates into mere gossip. In proportion as our inward life fails we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters proud of his extensive correspondence has not heard from himself this long while.

I love that. I had so many moments like that reading these people that I really I initially wrote the book not telling the life stories of lost first my first draft was just drawing on their ideas and then I realized I had to go back and talk about their lives because I just felt so connected to them. After realising there were all these parallels to our time. So that's the sort of the middle part of the book the meat and then in the last part of the book I take the ideas that I've gathered from these thinkers and I try to apply them to everyday situations. It's very. It's just meant to be suggestive I really try to make the book not prescriptive or preachy everybody's life is different. I just wanted to sort of throw out examples I really really wanted to just raise consciousness and let people try and use the same ideas to figure out their own solutions. But what it really comes down to is this idea of trying to achieve a better balance. And the notion that connectedness and wonderful technologies like these that we have today serve us best when they're offset by the opposite

force when they're offset by a little disconnect in this a little space a little gap between yourself and in this case the digital crowd. And in the end I have a chapter that's really sort of about the biggest experiment that my family has done. We realized actually before I even embarked on this project my wife and I were realizing that our family life was really suffering from the screen addiction that we all were feeling my son was eight or nine at the time we have just one child and my wife and I both work at home so we have home offices with screens and. I found that in the evenings after dinner we would try to gather to have family time in the living room and we would do what I came to think of as the deceptive vanishing family trick. One by one we would peel off on some flimsy excuse I have to go check something I need a glass of water and we were all going you know we were all going we were going back to the screen and really abandoning each other. Abandoning this life that we had built together in this home and this family life that meant so much to us supposedly but

somehow we were discounting it and deciding on this other force and the pull of the crowd. So my wife and I decided that we wanted to do something about it so we just started this completely ad hoc experiment inspired by nobody but just the nothing but the thought that the traditional weekend the idea of a traditional weekend we would disconnect the modem on Friday nights. The household modem that served all our computers and leave it unplugged until Monday morning and we would see what it was like to be off line two days a week. Well I can tell you it was unbelievably hard. It was this was over three years ago now that we started and the first couple months were really for Stickley the first few weekends were incredibly painful like pure withdrawal that I imagine a heroin addict must go through and I'm probably diminishing the pain of being a heroin addict there but it was it was quite remarkable and it convinced us that we were on to something that we really needed to do this. The very first weekend we were so discombobulated it really kind of had overtones of like an existential crisis

like we didn't know who we were anymore because we couldn't go to the inbox really and surf the net at one point we. We. We decided we were going to relieve the pain by going to a movie that night we told our son who was yelling Bring back the internet that we would go to take him to a movie that night in a cinema. And then we all started making for our screens to look up the movie listings and we realized we couldn't and then we remembered that movie listings used to be in newspapers but we weren't sure if we knew that they were still there. And we also had lost the knack for finding them so we started circling the pile of newspapers to see if we could remember how to do that. But the good the good news about this ritual of ours as I said as I recount in the book is that after a couple months it really started to become very natural and effortless even and after a while we began to realize in both senses of the word realized that we were really gaining a huge amount that we were going back to this other space that

matters hugely that we don't talk about. And it's really kind of that space that those people were in who walked by me without their gadgets today on the path. It's just that that place where you can have your own thoughts where you're where you're not. Where your moments are not contingent on the beyond and where eye contact came back. It was just a different kind of consciousness it's amazing I kept wishing in writing that part of the book I kept wishing I was William James and had his facility for describing states of consciousness which I don't but I did my best in my own prosaic way to get at it because I think it's really really important and that everybody should think about it and try and come out in their own way. Our ritual which we call the Internet Sabbath is not going to be for everybody. You know there are people who work on weekends who are people who have all kinds of schedules for which it would never be possible. But I do think there is a way in which everyone can try something of this nature to bring a little balance to their lives even if it's just an hour a day or a few hours a week as a start.

Because I can promise and I try and convey this in the book that the benefits are absolutely fantastic. And I think that if you come at it with that with the belief that it's worthwhile that there's a positive goal at the end of the tunnel which is what the philosopher is the reason that one of the reasons I have the philosophers is to show people to kind of ground this principle in history and in the past and then what other people have been through before. If you have that belief it's easier to kind of follow through with it because you're pursuing something that's tremendously valuable. So that's it. Thanks for listening and I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you. Questions. Right. Right

right right right. Because they're drawn to that yeah yeah. Good question Mike asked me to repeat the questions just so everyone can hear something I said so the question is what spiritual influences did I have in writing the book right. We are not a particularly religious family in the classic sense but I think that my wife and I are both spiritual and we read a lot and think a lot and sort of have our own. Grazing that we do in different traditions it's very valuable reading for the book that I did was much broader than what I described I actually read a lot of spiritual thought. People like Thomas Merton Eastern philosophers who really talk a lot about solitude and the value of you know rituals like this one that occur in different fashions all through all traditions I wound up not using over at least spiritual thought in the book much because I

kept trying to quote Merton actually but it just was not working because I really wanted the book to be incredibly inclusive for anyone who might read it and actually to feel really practical. And once you start quoting Thomas Merton of whom I'm a massive fan you really move very quickly away from kind of everyday life which is where I wanted the book to be very grounded. And I thought if this book is successful and I have a chance to write another one that would be the place to go. So thank you. Yes but you know my epigraph down. The road. Oh my

God. Yeah I. Thought it was not until salted right. But no doubt. Yeah yeah yeah the physical. Well yeah.

Oh absolutely. And you know both of them both Emerson The question was really about Emerson as opposed to Thoreau but both of them having these rituals and you know both of them walking was a real theme and they walk together of cost of course a lot and they also walked with others and walking is a huge theme for both of them. I want to read the epigraph because you referred to it and other people might not know it it's on a little different theme but it's basically this is from Emerson this time like all times is a very good one if we but know what to do with it. And that is from a lecture that he gave here in Cambridge actually. And I really wanted to use that because I wanted the book to be upbeat and to be I really felt in looking at the history of technology that the pessimists always wind up being wrong. I mean I couldn't find a time when the pessimists weren't wrong. There's a hilarious quote in here about someone who 15 years after Gutenberg an Italian scholar said he had such incredible hopes for this thing the book and it's been such a disaster because because anybody can now say anything they want it gets distributed all over the world. And that's what a lot of these anti digital people say all the time. You know it's just a shame that people can just say all these outrageous things

and there's no control over what they say it's the same argument. So anyway that's the optimism. Yeah. Yes. Yeah today you mean. Oh yeah well that's the burden. Yeah that's the burden and the challenge. I know you know. But I think that you know and that that's a great question sort of about the scholarly world and the need now to be up every day on everything right which is a new challenge. But I think that it's dawning on us that we this is happening to all of us not just scholars but everyone has this new burden of every moment there's something new that is available to you and you might need for your work or for your personal life how to decide when to check really. And I think that it's dawning on us that we need to decide and we need to work out. I'm using this word rituals over and over again but habits that help us do that. You know I didn't talk about this but there's a

section in the book about how businesses are wrestling with this and trying to get employees to have disconnected time because they're realizing they're losing money the bottom line is suffering from all this distractedness of the employees you know when you're talking from tast screen to screen to tast to tast to Facebook to Twitter to this and that at an office and trying to do your work. And when your employer has told you to use Facebook and Twitter because there are the new tools and you have no choice you wind up not getting a lot done. And these tools of efficiency wind up being tools of inefficiency and the good news is that technology companies are leading the way in studying this issue because their employees are the most connected of all. So I recount some of that in the book. Other questions. Oh

yeah. Yeah it's really true you know I just when I was in Washington just two days ago from my from my visits there for about the book I stayed with a friend who graduated from Harvard the class of 43 40 years ahead of me and he was talking about this same thing and he said you know it's weird I keep thinking back on a lot of the stuff I learned he had to read ancient Greek while here he had to and Latin and he said he picked up all kinds of tips that are helping him figure out this question. Now on the verge of age 90 to sort of get through the challenge and so it's wonderful you're making the same point. Thank you. Yeah yeah yeah. And you know we call that the Internet Sabbath totally on our own. And then we realized

friends when we told them about it started sending us clips and things people had written and there were even organizations the people doing the very same thing and calling it that. So it's one of those kind of convergence is that's occurring at all different places as the same truth dawns on people that we need something like this. Other questions. Yeah. Right. Well well take to it. Yeah well they were too risky it sort of cut both ways I knew that in even using the word philosophy on the cover and which my editor and I talked about a lot. You know that there was a potential that alienating people. But I felt if I put the word practical that would help. And I also really tried to write it simply and clearly. And I was thrilled when the New York Times said that about the writing because that really was

my goal to make it really. You know none of that one writer I love called it the squid spray of academics you know that need to like confuse obvious gate in order to seem like you're smarter than you are you know which so many academics unfortunately do out of insecurity I think. I really try to go in the other way in the other direction but I also knew I was running the risk of being criticized by the people who really I think I will be actually. That hasn't happened yet by the people who really are the experts on philosophers which I'm not who I'm sure are going to loath this book because you know I'm not speaking their language at all. But that hasn't happened yet so yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah yeah right. Yeah

right. Oh yeah. I don't get it when you say you know what. Oh right right right. Oh and then sending it on yeah yeah yeah yeah. I have been repeating the question sorry so the the questions about the the technological emphasis of the technology and the way that manifests itself in our own communications Yeah that's really true. There's often influenced too much by the technology. Yeah you know I have a little insight to share on that I'm on the I'm on time using Twitter to talk to try and publicize the book. I got a Twitter account and I'm using my own special approach to that which is one tweet per day Monday through Friday which is sort of runs against the way you're supposed to use Twitter supposedly But I actually love doing it because I get to think about my tweet all day and try to make it really good.

But but what I notice on Twitter is I started following on Twitter and you might not all know this you get to do these messages that are 140 characters that maximum 140 characters so they're very short messages you can do as many as you want. And they go out to people who have decided to follow you who are other Twitter people and then you can follow people and get their stream of messages. So I immediately started following people who struck me as interesting for various reasons I started following following somebody called philosophy tweets because he was tweeting just about the thinkers you know of the past. But I noticed that a lot of these people I started following not philosophy tweets but some of the others. So much of the content was about you know did you see that story about the i-Pad and what's you know what's up with Horizon and their disaster and it was all about the tools and they weren't people I checked in some of their little profiles they weren't people who even necessarily worked in the industry. They just are I guess they call themselves often gadget heads. You know I guess that's a particular calling for some people but I'm starting to unfollow those

people. You mean my interest in it. Oh yeah they were running around. Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah they were running around saying you know spending their days obsessing about you know the latest innovations on the table I don't think you know I think it kind of worked from and by the way I have been for I've been thinking back on the television age in my childhood in the television age and I don't remember people running around all day saying you know boy RCA versus Motorola what a battle you know but somehow it is today the obsession it's very interesting. Well look right

here. Yes this is what you wrote right there right there. Yeah that's funny. Phone is going off as worthless. Question go ahead. Yeah yeah yeah. Here it is. Yeah great question so the question is paper enabled a kind of solitude a kind of mode of thinking that digital devices don't seem to want to do and is the next generation going to find those spaces to think. You know I'm embarrassed your question really

makes me realize that I skipped over a huge part of talking about my essay that I wrote here that led to the book because it really was about that idea of paper giving you that space that that solitude as a as a place away from the digital sphere and that that is the emerging value of paper that's so far largely UN acknowledged although the reaction to my essay was such that gave me hope that other people are starting to think that way. And the younger generation in the couple of weeks I've been touring around talking about the book I have had a surprising thing happen which is has given me great optimism. Which is the people who come up to me and talk to me most excitedly often at events like this about the book. Are the people under 35 who. I'm not saying all of them. But there is something brewing in that generation I can feel it in their remarks and often they say to me that they're fascinated by the idea of the book and they came because they heard me on NPR something because they've never heard anybody saying this before. It's not even like something that was brought up as a possibility and it's dawning on

them you know gosh you know I maybe I am missing something you know because I've I'm a digital native I know nothing but this world. And is there some missing piece so I have found that I don't know that it represents a percentage of people it is self-selected people who came to hear me. So maybe not representative but I have found it helpful to more questions okay. Thought it was something that told you. That right. Yes I don't get over it.

Yeah well you're making a great point. One of the things we love about our Internet Sabbath is it's back to voice on the weekend and we've told you know when we started we told friends if you want to reach us on the weekend we're not going to get the e-mail but call. And there's actually this weird awkwardness now with voice communication with the young it has a nice dimension I think which is that they think of it as a manners issue that it's actually more intrusive to call someone and demand that they talk to you right in the moment. We didn't grow up thinking that way. In fact we grew up in a world in which when the fly did anyway when the phone rang you ran to answer it like a slave until voicemail came along. So I kind of like that they have it is a way in which the you know the etiquette has changed and it's got a nice element to it but it is discounting a wonderful aspect of connectedness that I think they're not enjoying to the extent that they could the New York Times have had a recent front page story about this the decline of the voice in the use of mobile devices it was fascinating and it is it is the young

we tend to focus on the young because they're the digital natives and so forth but everyone is moving away from voice and I don't know that it's going to be permanent. A lot of these periods that I looked at there was like then a kind of like a sort of a push back. And people realized you know wait a minute this is still in Shakespeare's time there was a sense that handwriting was dying out. By some futurists and of the time if you will futurists and in fact handwriting had a huge explosion it became more popular and important than ever in the age of print so you can't really predict one more one more question. Yeah.

Yeah the question is in the younger people today the less likelihood of encountering strangers and having those random I guess you would say encounters that can lead down wonderful paths that's what you're saying right. Yeah it's really true I have noticed if I may be presumptuous in your generation a kind of a social awkwardness about meeting someone by chance and you don't know them and there's kind of a less openness generally speaking I think which is too bad. I have just also noticed in my own experience in the digital world when you move through the world and actually consciously try to leave yourself open to those encounters how much more exciting they become because they've become so exceptional I had one right outside the door here just but just as I was arriving I was walking along I had shut my phone off so I couldn't be checking that. And I had put my my own Hamlets tables back in my pocket so I wasn't looking and I think I was walking along and I was noticing this beautiful baby coming at me in a stroller and I was really looking at the baby and thinking God what a great baby I wish I'd had more babies and I only had

one. And the baby suddenly dropped her bottle on the sidewalk. And I got to pick it up and give it to the parents and have this nice moment that wasn't actually even a verbal exchange. We just sort of smiled and acknowledged each other but it was a great moment. And it wouldn't if it was like the Emerson in the bare common in the snow puddles you know it was like something that had no words but was wonderful and it would not have happened if I hadn't just put myself in that state where I could have an encounter with a stranger because I I was present. You know I was right here and we're not right here. So much of the time anymore we're sort of not showing up for our lives because over using these gadgets and letting them lead us around so. Thank you. Thanks for coming.