Hamlet's BlackBerry (10 page)

The poles represent not just the fact of being in a crowd or being alone but the types of experience associated with those situations. When we're alone, our thoughts and feelings are oriented inward, and experience tends to be relatively quiet and slow. In contrast, in a crowd—whether physical or virtual—our orientation is more external, simply because there's more happening, more demands on our attention. Life in a crowd is typically busier and faster.

The rest of the continuum represents the range of situations between these extremes. Moving from left to right, solitude gives way to interaction with others, and one's experience
becomes relatively more outward and busy. Moving from right to left, the crowd grows smaller, and experience is relatively less busy and more inward. When Socrates and Phaedrus leave the city, they dramatically reduce the intensity of their connectedness, shifting from the omega end of the continuum toward alpha. Distance makes all the difference.

This is just a simple graphic device, and it can't begin to represent the full range of human experience. Everyone's temperament is unique, and we all have our own personal reactions to crowds as well as to solitude. There are born introverts as well as extroverts, and countless shades in between. A situation that feels oppressively crowded and busy to you might not strike me in the same way. Still, there is a rough correlation between how immersed anyone is in a crowd and how busy (or not) their thoughts are. And this idea is central to understanding the workings of human connectedness.

In the chapters to come, as the story progresses from Plato's era to the present, I'll occasionally use this continuum as
a point of reference. Though the other six philosophers lived in different times and technological climates, the fundamental issue remained the same: the individual trying to make the most of life in an increasingly crowded, busy society. The philosophical goal—a practically useful way of thinking about technology, so it serves the full range of human needs, inside and out—doesn't change, either. The point is not to run away from the crowd and become a hermit. For most of us, the pure alpha life would be as unpleasant as the pure omega. The point is to find a happy balance.

Plato captures this idea at the end of the dialogue, when, having refreshed themselves and had a conversation for the ages, the two men decide to start back for the city. Socrates offers a prayer: “Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one.”

Seneca on Inner Space

“I force my mind to become self-absorbed and not let outside things distract it. There can be absolute bedlam without so long as there is no commotion within.”

 

N
ot long ago, I began using my computer in a new way. Late at night, when the dishes were done and the bedtime stories over, I'd hole up in my home office for a half hour and watch music videos. I'm into jazz from the late 1950s and early '60s, a period one might not expect to be well represented online. Yet there's a rich trove of vintage clips out there from old television shows, films, and other sources, which ardent fans have taken the trouble to find and upload. Search for “Coltrane” or “Nina Simone” on the popular site YouTube, and within seconds you're watching a drop-dead performance you never knew existed until that moment, thanks to the enthusiasm and industry of someone identified only as DavidB87523 or NinaFreek.

Though these private concerts took place in what was technically leisure time, their purpose was broader than fun and diversion. This was a way of clearing my head at the end of a hectic workday, a personal version of the walk outside the walls
of Athens recounted by Plato. No matter what kind of work one does, it's essential to step away on a regular basis, to recharge and gain perspective. In an always-connected world, the need for these gaps is more urgent than ever, yet harder to find.

With wireless signals nearly ubiquitous, physical escape of the Greek sort is practically impossible. So it's become necessary to create gaps
within
one's connected life. This is why some businesses and other organizations have begun asking, and in some cases demanding, that employees
not
check their office e-mail on weekends. All work and no play makes Jack a dull member of the team.

When you work for yourself, you have to be your own mental watchdog. Nothing wakes up my sense of inner freedom, or approximates the “divine” possession described by Socrates, like a great jazz performance. And now there was a whole new way to enjoy that experience, on the same screens where we do our work and run the rest of our lives. It seemed an ideal reprieve from the grind, a digital answer to a digital dilemma. Except for one problem: I was indeed using the
same screen
where so many other things were happening, in my world and everyone else's. While I had the crowd to thank for these videos, I also had to contend with the crowd as I watched them. And this turned out to be a challenge.

I've enjoyed jazz in many different situations, including live shows at clubs, concert halls, and outdoor festivals. I've listened to recordings at home, in the car, and on my iPod and occasionally watched performances on television or a movie screen. So I had a considerable database of experience with which to compare these computer-screen encounters. There's no question they brought me pleasure and occasionally left me gaping. Watching Miles Davis is qualitatively different from just hearing him; my eyes confirm that it
was
just a man, not a god, who produced those sounds.

Yet the video sessions fell short of the stroll outside the city walls I'd hoped for, because they were playing on a screen hooked up live to the digital grid, with its never-ending buzz of distractions. And that made it a lot harder to put any real distance between myself and the crowd. Instead of wandering down to the stream, I was stranded in the busiest city ever built, the digital one.

One night, for example, I was playing a clip from the Newport Jazz Festival of 1958. Dinah Washington was singing “All of Me” and she was on fire, thrilling to watch.
All of me. Why not take aaaaaaaall of me?
But the video is just a part of the experience on sites such as YouTube, which is designed to play up its participatory, user-driven approach. Using the site, you're constantly reminded that you're in the midst of millions of others whose presence affects everything you see and hear.

The page informed me that the video had been viewed more than 100,000 times, and rated by 203 people, with an impressive average rating of five stars. There were dozens of comments, many of which had multiple replies. One commenter noted that the singer “is my second cousin who I never met but I can't get enough of her music.” I could feel all sorts of people hovering around the edges of the screen, jabbering away and inviting me to join in. To help me do this, there were buttons for sharing the clip, making it a favorite, flagging it, and adding it to my playlists. There were thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs and an invitation to post a video response. And there were direct links to the most popular social networks, where I could alert my friends to this find.

To the right of the box in which the video was playing was an advertisement, part of which unexpectedly—yikes!—expanded when I moved my mouse across it. Bannered across the top was a notice that YouTube would soon be “phasing
out support” for my browser and I should upgrade to a “more modern” one now.

Digital technology is configured to encourage busyness, but then, so are we. As I took all this in while intermittently watching Dinah, my right index finger rested lightly on the clicker, trained by years of grazing to layer on the tasks and stimuli by seeking something new every few moments. There were other Web pages and applications already open behind and beside this one. Though I wasn't there for any of that stuff—this was supposedly my own personal after-hours jazz club, a place to sit back and do one delicious thing—the mind is adept at rationalizing its wandering eye. Isn't curiosity a virtue? Why
not
check my inbox? What were my friends doing right now over on social network X? What had happened in the world since I'd last scanned the news at media site Y?

I gave in to the last of these urges. “Enormous Jellyfish Sink Japanese Fishing Boat,” said the first headline to come up, with a color photo of the dreadful monster. Shocking! “1 Dead, Others Reportedly Shot at Oregon Office Park,” “Threat of Satellite Collision Grows,” said one of the sidebar items, which, though disturbing, somehow hadn't made the nearby list of Most Read Stories, which I naturally checked out, top to bottom.

Now that my attention was loosed, there was no turning back. I clicked over to one of my e-mail services, which brought yet another menu of news headlines including, at last, something positive: “Ex–MLB Pitcher's Mom Rescued from Kidnappers.” I didn't even know she was gone.

None of these side trips served any useful purpose. There was no reason for me to throw a plague of giant Pacific jellyfish into my cognitive-emotional stew, not at this moment. I was just yielding to the momentum of my own busy mind and thereby undermining the task at hand, which was to make it
less
busy, less full of the outward world and everyone in it.

I like other human beings quite a lot. I love my family and friends. I feel very lucky to live in a small town where I can walk down Main Street and run into half a dozen nice people I know. I relish the thought that there are billions of other people out there I don't know but one day might. That we can all now share our thoughts and interests with one another so easily, without meeting in person, strikes me as a tremendous step forward for humanity. The fact that I can type a couple of words and be transported instantly to a fabulous musical moment from a decade when I wasn't even alive, thanks to the kindness of a stranger—it's just beautiful.

Having been transported to that moment, however, I want to make the most of it. I want to experience what that jazz-loving stranger gave me in the way it deserves to be experienced. I want to be
in
the moments the music and images are creating, to know them in all their richness. For that to happen, I need to get away from the digital crowd and the claims it makes on my consciousness. Not completely away, because then I wouldn't be able to enjoy Dinah. Just far enough that I don't feel that caffeinated click-click-click of the mind. But the way screen life works, it's extremely hard to do so.

Somewhere in the background, Dinah was still at it.
Come on, baby, come on, Daddy, and get ALL of meeee!
She sounded as awesome as ever, but most of
me
had moved on. I'd broken the spell, pulled away from a source of intense pleasure and release without fully realizing I was doing so or knowing why. That wasn't the jazz experience I'd had in mind and knew so well from the past. It was
jazzus interruptus
, an unsatisfying pantomime of the real thing. Rather than shaking off the jumbled, vaguely unfulfilled state of consciousness my workday had left me in, I'd intensified it. This effort to free my inner self of its burdens had landed me in a jail without bars, the restless, outward-leaning screen state of mind—which,
weirdly, stays with you long after you step away from the screen. Some nights, I swear, it follows me not just to bed but into my dreams.

In a sense, I was holding those videos to an unfair standard. YouTube doesn't pretend to be a tranquil grove. If I really wanted a pure music immersion, sans distractions, I could have taken six steps into the living room and fired up the old stereo. However, the point of this exercise was to take advantage of something potentially wonderful about the
new
technology, a way in which the key source of my busyness might also serve as its antidote.

This is an increasingly important question, as the digital zone becomes the destination for more of
everything
we do. Work, family, friendships, thinking, reading—so much of life is migrating to these machines with their ever-expanding universe of information and potential tasks. Technology companies tout the many-splendored connectedness of digital tools as their chief advantage: the more people and information you can connect with and the faster and more intensely, the better. But after a while, all that flitting around does something terrible to your inner life. It denies you the very thing you went to the screen for in the first place: happiness.

My failed jazz experiment was just a small specimen of this paradox, a minor disappointment to me and of no consequence to anyone else. But its smallness is what makes it so telling. If I can't use this new medium to open up a tiny gap between myself and the crowd, long after the workday has ended, at an hour that's all about quiet and retreat, how is anyone going to do it while attending to the truly urgent needs of jobs, relationships, and other important aspects of life? The effort I was making to clear some space for my thoughts is emblematic of a much larger struggle with momentous implications. The
frazzled, overconnected inner self is reporting to work every day in offices around the world. It's running corporations, universities, and nations. It's raising children and teaching them in school. It's trying to compose symphonies and write novels. It's working to fight hunger and poverty, end wars, find cures for disease. And it's trying to do all that while simultaneously navigating the ubiquitous digital crowd.

If distance is as valuable as Plato suggests, where on earth are we going to find it?

This would seem to be an entirely new dilemma, a lamentable by-product of the latest technologies. It certainly
feels
like a recent phenomenon. In fact, it isn't new at all. As the world has grown steadily more connected over the centuries, the physical distance Socrates and Phaedrus enjoyed has been losing its power to relieve the overloaded self. Even in ancient societies, people found it hard to escape their own busyness. The burdens and distractions of the city had a way of following them everywhere. The mind of two thousand years ago often felt hounded, too, cornered, with no place to hide. And back then, as now, there was a need for creative solutions.

One of the first thinkers to recognize this was the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. He was born around the same time as Christ in the Spanish city of Córdoba, an important outpost of the Roman Empire, where his father was an imperial official. At a very young age he was sent to Rome for his education, and he went on to pursue a career in the government. By his midthirties he was a senator, and he later became a senior adviser to Nero during the latter's first eight years as emperor. Nero was just a teenager when he took the throne, and Seneca wound up effectively running the empire during those years, wielding such power that one twentieth-century historian called him “the real master of the world.” Scholars
have rated this period among the empire's best, and Seneca is widely credited for its success.
^*

But it was as a philosopher that Seneca made his most lasting contribution. He left behind a remarkable body of writings in which he wrestles with what constitutes a good, happy life and how to find it. He was a very busy man writing from the thick of life, and he knew how to get to the point and say it memorably. Writing about wealth and poverty, for instance, he says, “It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more.” He believed the primary mission of philosophy should be to offer people practical advice on how to live better. His essays and letters often feel as if they were written not 2,000 years ago but last week. This is particularly the case when he's talking about the problem of life in a crowded world and the difficulty of finding a space apart for the mind. Mastering the
outer
world is one thing, but it's an even harder trick, he realized, to master the
inner
one, especially when you live at a time when the two are at odds. We live in such a time, and so did Seneca.

The Romans had taken the Greek concept of civilization, which had reached its highest expression in Athens, and expanded it to dramatic new proportions. Their empire stretched from northern Africa to Britain and east across Europe all the way to the Middle East. They devised various ingenious ways of pulling this vast domain together, to make it more efficient and manageable, including an excellent system of roads, a far-flung but highly disciplined army and civil service, and an extensive postal system. In addition to making Rome run more smoothly, all of this had the effect of shrinking the distances between places and people.