Hamlet's BlackBerry - Book Review

Hamlet's BlackBerry - Book Review

Ever feel the vibration of your phone in your pocket and reach for it only to realize it’s on the kitchen table? Ever miss your kid’s big moment in the game because you were texting instead of paying attention?

I have.

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That’s why I eagerly devoured William Powers’ excellent Hamlet’s BlackBerry. The former Washington Post writer and current recovering tech addict can’t bear the thought of not being accessible to anyone or anything anytime, but he has a family he loves that doesn’t want to share him with his technomistress.  Sounds eerily familiar. Chronicling this clash and finding a workable compromise to arrive at “a good life in the digital age” (the book’s subtitle) is the book’s undertaking. Powers is a Rhode Island native.

While it’s tempting to think this addiction to texting, email, social networking, and all manner of gadgets stems from the mind-blowing proliferation of wired devices, Powers carefully separates symptom from disease. This is not an addiction to technology. It’s an addiction to being consumed with what’s “out there” at the expense of developing what’s inside. The technology simply gives plausible deniability, enabling addicts to be present physically even when they’re miles away mentally.

Powers digs into the ‘mile-wide-and-inch-deep’ culture with great vigor, cataloging his own experiences while also putting the phenomena in historical context. While I found it encouraging to learn how the great minds from Plato to Throreau similarly wrestled with balancing their inner and outer selves (my words, not Powers’) it’s nevertheless daunting to think what the chances of a complete recovery are for me if those titans couldn’t crack the code. When I go to Walden Pond I check-in on Foursquare.

Just as Powers doesn’t blindly rail against technology and its evils (he’s a fan of quite a lot of it and properly realizes how in moderation it really can deliver on the promise of improving our lives measurably), similarly he doesn’t preach about the cure. There is no app for eliminating all our apps. We must ‘just say no’ if we’re to reclaim some of the quality time we fritter away on the non-essential.  Like poverty and homeless that’s just outside our door if we’d only stop to look, Powers holds up a mirror and waits for us to stop looking at our iPads long enough to see ourselves as we really are, not what our profile says we are.

For this alone, Powers is to be commended. 

Hamlet's BlackBerry is published by Harper Collins and can be purchased at most every bookstore and can easily be downloaded to a kindle or IPad.  

Patrick Reynolds is a Senior Vice President at Ando Media.  Ando is a top media company in New England and was founded in Providence.