Hamlet's BlackBerry (12 page)

Writing a letter meets all these criteria. In a society where physical distance was no longer an effective escape from the crowd, Seneca sat down with a blank page and escaped in another way: he found
inner
distance.

Written language didn't always work this miracle, of course. Like a book read too hurriedly, a letter dashed off without much thought would be more of a “flying visit” and probably not much help. It's obvious from reading Seneca's letters that he gave himself fully to the writing of them. This is why they've proven useful to so many readers and survived for so long. More than 1,500 years after his death, Queen Elizabeth I used to start her day with his advice on how to quiet the mind. She would often translate Seneca from Latin into English, thus engaging in the very same activity that had worked for him in the room over the spa, writing.

Could it work for us? The goal of my online jazz sessions had similarly been to turn the technology of the present back on itself. I didn't have much success, but perhaps that was because I hadn't used the Senecan approach. That is, I hadn't viewed my situation as the
philosophical
problem it was. As a busy man in a busy society, Seneca often found himself stuck at the far end of the continuum of connectedness,
the overcrowded place I call omega. So he developed a few practical techniques, grounded in his Stoic philosophy, for moving back toward alpha. Choose one idea a day to think about more deeply. Train the mind to tune out the chaos, through the art of concentration. These may not be startling insights, but the fact is, they hadn't occurred to
me
. Seneca was more conscious and thoughtful about his overload problem than I'd been about mine.

I went back to the screen and tried again with the same video. This time, before I even sat down, I contemplated my own craving for inwardness and what I might do differently this time that would help me attain it. I made sure there were no other distracting applications open on my screen. When I called up the video on YouTube, I immediately looked for a way of blocking out the user comments and all the other crowd-oriented bells and whistles that had been the start of my mind's wanderings.

There were a couple of options. One was a button that would allow me to view the video by itself in a new window, while leaving the original window (with all the bells and whistles) open and partially visible. Another would maximize the video so it took up the whole screen. The latter was more in tune with my aim—to maximize just one thing, minimize the rest—so I went for that. As soon as I did so, I remembered why I rarely used that button: there's a technological price to pay for enlarging a video; in chasing psychic seclusion, I lost clarity and resolution. Though I wouldn't want to view my videos that way all the time, I could live with it for the purposes of the experiment.

Since this time I was really trying to focus, I suppose it was inevitable that I would do better. In fact, I stayed with Dinah straight to the end, no side trips. When she was done, I closed the browser, stood up, turned off my desk lamp, and abandoned the screen. Walking across the house, I tried to determine if
I felt any different. Consciousness can't be measured precisely like body temperature, and it's hard to compare states of mind across time. The music and images had certainly been terrific, and by not darting around I felt I'd enjoyed it all more fully. Still, I couldn't honestly say that there had been, in Seneca's words, “no commotion within.”

Though the full-screen view had been less busy and I'd restrained myself from veering off, this time something else had gotten into the way. Purely because the experience was still taking place on a digitally connected screen—the green modem and router lights were glowing off to my left the entire time—my mind was in connect mode from the moment I entered my office. It's almost Pavlovian: I see the screen, I know it's connected, and my thoughts shift into a different gear. I associate the tool so closely with outwardness that it's hard even to think of it as a tool of inwardness. And since the exercise was all about thinking, that was a problem.

In a sense, therefore, the issue was in my head. But the fact is, the technology itself doesn't help much. Seneca was lucky enough to have at hand a tool that's unusually good at inducing concentration. Today's machines could go a lot further toward helping us out. Having made the philosophical choice for a more inward life, I would have appreciated a device that acknowledged focus as a worthy goal and offered easy ways to achieve it. The various sorts of busyness I was forced to block out of the experience were manifestations of the maximalist bias of digital devices. Our screens are designed to keep us as connected and busy as possible, in full-on crowd mode. And they make it very difficult to shift out of it. Gadgets now exist that allow one to remove some of the more annoying distractions from the online experience, but they're add-ons, and they haven't changed the fundamental tendency.

It was late when my experiment ended, and I did something I don't normally do at bedtime. I took a portable radio into the bedroom and tuned in to a jazz show out of Boston that I usually listen to in the kitchen in the early evening. Somehow, the fact that it was a
local
radio station, arriving not through a digital connection but over the airwaves, was important. Lying there in the dark listening locally was a way of completing what I'd started with the video—putting some distance between myself and the big, busy, connected world.

Gutenberg and the Business of Inwardness

“Even before the books were finished, there were customers ready to buy them.”

 

W
hen one of the most anticipated gadgets of the last decade, the Apple iPhone 3G, arrived in stores around the world a few summers ago, it was hailed as a wonder. This was not just a phone but a sleek pocket computer that did it all: web browser, camera, video and music player, navigational device, and many other things. It could also run on faster networks than the original iPhone, allowing the user to perform more tasks more quickly. “Even better,” enthused one magazine reviewer, “3G coverage enables you to make a phone call and surf the Web at the same time.” In other words, by the currently prevailing philosophy of digital life—the more connected you are to more people and information at all times, the better—it was a dream machine. And it set off one of those mass consumer frenzies that have become a kind of global ceremony, with quasi-religious overtones.

“Lines for what the faithful call the ‘Jesus phone' started forming early Friday outside Apple Stores from Silicon Valley to Hong Kong,” reported the
Mercury News
of northern
California, “with hardy souls bringing sleeping bags, laptops and a desire to bond with fellow iPhone acolytes.” At one Tokyo store, the line was half a mile long, the atmosphere pure pandemonium. “The store's entrance was besieged by reporters and camera crews,” according to a news report, “while helicopters circled overhead as an LED display counted down to when the handset went on sale.” The first customer in line, one Hiroyuki Sano, had traveled 220 miles and camped outside the store for three days. When he walked out with his prize, a large pack of tech paparazzi chased him for four blocks, trying to get a quote. “I'm extremely happy,” the reportedly breathless Sano finally said.

And why not? He was holding the ultimate handheld. We're always happy when we purchase a shiny new connective device, because we're thinking about all the interesting, useful, fun things it will do for us. And how much better it will be than the old device, which was fine but didn't
quite
meet our needs. The new model is the answer, and it's worth braving the crowd to get it.

When we take it home and start using it, however, a problem arises: we're still in a crowd, the screen crowd that's every bit as crazy as the one in Tokyo. The very thing that makes these technologies so popular, their capacity to keep us in closer, more constant touch with the rest of the planet, is what makes them such a burden. They're better at making us busier. Their greatest strength is their greatest weakness. We're as hounded by our screens as poor Mr. Sano was by the paparazzi, except we invite this crowd to chase us. We carry it in our pockets and respond to its every demand.

If having an inward life matters as much as having an outward one, we've created a technological quandary for ourselves. The gadgets we buy and use every day are designed, built, and marketed on the premise that it's an unalloyed good to always
be in the crowd. And that turns out to be a lousy idea. It makes no sense to work and live in this fractured, always-on-call fashion. Rather than bringing the crowd ever closer, our machines should help us find some distance, whenever we need it.

Based on recent experience, it's hard to see how that's going to happen. On one level, we're at the mercy of the big technology companies, which make enormous profits from tools that seek to increase the intensity of our connectedness, pushing us further and further toward the crowded omega end of the spectrum. And there would seem to be no good business argument for any of them to adopt a new approach. Why change course when people everywhere are lining up to buy your products?

But those lines point to the true source of the problem: us. The merchants of technology aren't forcing anyone to buy their machines. We've signed on to the notion that the best devices are those that deliver maximum connectedness, and we've endorsed it with our wallets. In effect, we're designing our technological future, striving to make life even busier and harder to navigate than it is now.

Are we stuck in the crowd forever?

Not if the past is any guide. New connective devices have always had an outward bias. That's why they come along in the first place, to help people reach outward. New technologies form new crowds. And the better they are at it, the more eagerly they're adopted. However, because they tend to increase the individual's exposure to the crowd and ramp up the busyness, they strain the mind and the spirit. Thus, it becomes essential to find escape hatches. As the previous two chapters showed, in the ancient world forward-thinking people discovered clever ways to do just that. In ancient Athens, physical distance did the trick for two friends who fled the city with the help of a scroll. In frenetic Rome, Seneca found inner
distance in the act of writing a letter. In both cases, the connective technology that was making the world smaller, written alphabet-based language, played a key role. A tool of outwardness could foster inwardness, too.

However, there was one aspect of written language that remained highly outward and crowd-oriented: reading. In ancient Greece and Rome and for most of the Middle Ages, reading was not the private activity we know today. For more than a thousand years, most reading was done
aloud
, much as Phaedrus read to Socrates from a scroll. People would sit in libraries and monasteries with books open in front of them, reading audibly, using their voices. The kind of reading we take for granted—an individual sitting silently with a book, eyes moving across the lines—was rare. Silent reading was so rare that when someone engaged in it, others remarked on it as curious and even eccentric.

Saint Augustine, who lived in Italy in the late fourth century
A.D
., notes in his
Confessions
that the bishop of Milan (known today as Saint Ambrose) had an unusual habit: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue still.” Reading in this fashion was, according to Augustine, the bishop's way of “refreshing” his mind. This story, vividly retold by Alberto Manguel in his 1996 book
A History of Reading
, is the earliest known instance in Western history of a person who habitually read to himself without speaking.

Reading was, as Manguel put it, an “oral skill.” It was also a social one, in that it generally happened in the company of others. Rather than reading privately, people gathered to be read to in groups. There were various reasons for this. Most people couldn't read at all, so oral culture had lived on since the genesis of writing, as had the belief that spoken expression was the highest form of communication. Collective reading
was also a product of economics. Books were made by hand and, for most people, including many who could read, prohibitively expensive. After the fall of Rome, the Church was the producer and proprietor of most written information in Europe. Unless you were very rich and could afford your own library, it was only at Mass and other religious gatherings that most people came within reach of the beautiful hand-lettered tomes laboriously produced by Church scribes. In short, reading had not yet become the private, inward activity it is today.

During medieval times, this began to change. Some who had access to books started to read silently in private. And they discovered what a different experience it was from reading aloud and among others. To read privately without vocalizing the words was to take an inner journey, shared by no one else and not subject to outside influence or control. The mind was not simply “refreshed,” as Augustine had observed, but liberated. Private reading allowed one to own the text in a new way. And having taken ownership, readers could wander
outside
the confines of the text, generating new thoughts and ideas for themselves. Certainly, this kind of thinking could also occur when books were read out loud, but because private reading was inherently inward, it was more conducive to it. For the pioneers of this practice, many of them scholarly monks, this was a revelation and no doubt exhilarating. It was a whole new way to enjoy the inner distance that Seneca had experienced while writing a letter.

Still, even as inward reading was embraced by the lucky few, for the many, books remained largely out of reach. Through the early fifteenth century, reading remained the crowd-oriented experience it had always been. And there was no reason to think that would ever change. First, there were serious technological constraints to making books more accessible. They were made of costly materials (animal skins, paper,
ink) by skilled craftsmen who could work only so quickly. Second, the most powerful elements of society, the Church and the aristocracy, were not eager to promote wider availability of books and the inward experience they offered. The Church in particular understood that reading could be a route to unorthodox, heretical thoughts and therefore a threat. It was around the same time that silent reading became the norm among the educated, roughly the year 1000, that the first heretics were burned at the stake. There were enough troublemakers. Why encourage the rabble to think for themselves?

The notion that these constraints might be surmounted and private, inward reading somehow become available broadly to all kinds of people was as unlikely as the prospect of digital devices helping
us
get away from the crowd seems today. Impossible! Yet it was about to happen. And the way it happened demonstrates not just that technologies can be rethought in unexpected ways but that those who solve this particular riddle can reap enormous rewards.

 

I
N
1432,
THE
German city of Aachen hosted an event that epitomized how crowded medieval life often was. Aachen, one of Europe's great cathedral cities, was a major destination of Christian pilgrimages like the one portrayed in Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
. Pilgrims went to Aachen because its magnificent cathedral housed some of the most sacred relics in all of Christendom, including what were reputed to be the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus, the Virgin Mary's robes, and the cloth used to wrap the severed head of John the Baptist. These objects were widely thought to have miraculous powers, and they drew such huge crowds that in the late 1300s Church officials decided they had to limit access to them. Henceforth
the relics would be shown to the public only once every seven years, and for just two weeks.

During those septennial events, Aachen was inundated with pilgrims. It happened in 1432, with thousands pouring into the city from near and far on foot, horseback, and donkey, in carts, wagons, and any other means they could find. Like Chaucer's pilgrims, they were a motley assemblage representing a wide range of classes and circumstances. But having reached the cathedral, they merged into one crowd, a heaving, shouting, sweaty mass of humanity, all trying to reach the same goal, the sacred relics. One year, the pressure of all those bodies caused a building to collapse on the crowd, leaving seventeen dead and a hundred injured.

What exactly were they seeking? Tradition held that the relics sent out invisible rays imbued with divine powers that could heal the sick and answer other prayers. The surest way to obtain these blessings was to touch the objects. That had once been easy to do, but as the crowds had grown over the years it had become impossible to provide physical access to everyone—too many people, too little time. However, if you stood in the path of the rays and they hit you, it was thought to be just as good. Thus, during pilgrimages, the relics were moved to a raised platform outside the cathedral, where clerics held them aloft one at a time in order to give the rays wide distribution.

A special device had been created to ensure that no one missed out: a small convex mirror designed to catch and absorb the rays. The mirrors were fashioned from metal, often embellished with decorative designs, and sometimes worn as a badge. According to historian John Man, a pilgrim, having bought one from a local vendor, would find a vantage point with a straight line to the relics—some scaled the city walls—and
hold it up “as if it were a third eye.” Because the mirrors were thought to retain the sacred energy, they could be used long afterward to heal the blind, the sick, and anyone else in need of divine help. “You could head for home in the secure and happy knowledge that you carried in your belt-pouch the very essence of the miraculous,” writes Man.

They were a handheld, mobile version of the relics, with excellent storage capacity, and, to those who believed in their power, they performed a valuable service. During the 1432 pilgrimage the mirrors were so popular that the local artisans who made them under a guild-controlled monopoly couldn't keep up with the demand. So it was decided that for future pilgrimages, craftsmen from other towns would be allowed to make and sell them, too. Since the gatherings could draw well over 100,000 people, it was a business opportunity with obvious potential. A new supply of mirrors would, as another historian puts it, “no doubt command a ready sale among the multitude.”

One of those who jumped at it was Johann Gutenberg, an ambitious entrepreneur from Strasbourg, who had an original idea. Up to this point, the mirrors had been made by hand, a time-consuming task. Gutenberg believed there was a way to mass-produce them with an existing technology, the presses that had been used for centuries to make wine and olive oil. Rather than extracting liquid from fruit, a press could be used to punch out mirrors from sheets of metal, with each sheet yielding many mirrors. If it worked, Gutenberg would be making mirrors at a rate no artisan could match and at a much lower cost—a classic economies-of-scale strategy.

He brought some background to the task, having grown up around metalsmiths and coin makers, and he found three backers. They set up a partnership to manufacture mirrors for the next pilgrimage. Their plan was to sell 32,000 of them,
with Gutenberg getting 50 percent of the profit while the other three split the remaining half. The mirrors were apparently made and sold, but there are no surviving records of how many, or whether Gutenberg made a profit on the venture.