By William Powers
A crisp, passionately argued solution to the query that everybody who is grown depending on electronic units is looking: "Where's the remainder of my life?" At a time while we are all attempting to make feel of our relentlessly hooked up lives, this revelatory publication offers a daring new method of the electronic age. half highbrow trip, half memoir, Hamlet's BlackBerry units out to resolve what William Powers calls the conundrum of connectedness. Our pcs and cellular units do significant issues for us. yet in addition they impose an immense burden, making it more durable for us to concentration, do our greatest paintings, construct robust relationships, and locate the intensity and achievement we crave. Hamlet's BlackBerry argues that we want a brand new mind set, a regular philosophy for all times with displays. to discover it, Powers reaches into the earlier, uncovering a wealthy trove of principles that experience helped humans deal with and luxuriate in their hooked up lives for millions of years. New applied sciences have consistently introduced the combination of pleasure and tension that we suppose this day. Drawing on a few of history's so much really good thinkers, from Plato to Shakespeare to Thoreau, he indicates that electronic connectedness serves us top whilst it really is balanced via its contrary, disconnectedness. utilizing his personal existence as laboratory and item lesson, Powers demonstrates why this can be the instant to revisit our dating to monitors and cellular applied sciences, and the way profound the rewards of doing so could be. vigorous, unique, and interesting, Hamlet's BlackBerry will problem you to reconsider your electronic existence.
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Additional resources for Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age
Example text
Dozens of tasks jostle and compete for our attention on the screen, and both software and hardware are designed to make it easy to hop around. So easy, it’s irresistible. The cursor never rests in one place for long, and neither does the mind. We’re always clicking here, there, and everywhere. Thus, although we think of our screens as productivity tools, they actually undermine the serial focus that’s the essence of true productivity. And the faster and more intense our connectedness becomes, the further we move away from that ideal.
If I’d kept on using the phone for other tasks, there wouldn’t have been time or space in my thoughts for the moment to unfold as it did. The same goes for any screen task with the potential for deeper impact and value, and many do have that potential—it could happen, but only if you give it room. We don’t know about those lost opportunities, of course, because they never see the light of day. But I think we miss them, nonetheless, whenever it occurs to us that life isn’t quite hanging together, isn’t adding up to what it might be.
It can summarized in a sentence: It’s good to be connected, and it’s bad to be disconnected. This is a simple idea but one with enormous implications.