Hamlet's BlackBerry (13 page)

For our purposes, however, what matters is the fundamental problem he was trying to solve and where it led him next. Gutenberg saw that there was money to be made in helping those of his time deal with the challenge of crowds. The pilgrims had arrived in Aachen en masse and willingly formed a crowd in order to obtain the blessings of the relics. It was an outward journey, but the goal was inward: to absorb the spiritual emanations of the relics into their bodies and souls and take them back home. The crowd presented an obstacle in two different ways: it was a physical obstacle blocking bodily access to the relics, and it was a virtual or effective obstacle, in that the sheer number of people made it impossible for local artisans to supply enough of the mirrors that surmounted the physical impediment by “connecting” through the air.

The horde outside the Aachen cathedral was different in countless ways from the digital crowd we find ourselves in lately. But the two crowds are alike in one important respect: we, too, are making outward journeys in pursuit of inward goals, using our “Jesus phones” to catch invisible signals. And the crowd is getting in
our
way, too. Why do you buy a new screen device in the first place? Is it merely to project yourself outward into the world, to connect for connecting's sake? No, you connect in order to do your work well, to communicate with friends, to learn and explore. Using a screen, you pursue those goals outwardly, by navigating the digital crowd. However, at the end of the day, what matters is what you take home. It's about the quality of your life experience, which is a product of how well the device helped you perform your outward tasks
while reaping inner rewards
.

Does your screen time help you think and work better? Does it deepen your ties to your friends? Does it help you find that much-needed distance and space? Do your explorations enrich your understanding of the world? Do you come away in a better state of mind than you were in to begin with? These are all interior questions. And the more time you spend in the digital crowd, the harder it is to answer them in the affirmative. Inner life becomes not deeper and happier but shallower and more unpleasant.

Gutenberg was a businessman and technologist, but his inventions had profound philosophical implications. In the case of the mirrors, mass production would allow more pilgrims to have their own private connection to the relics, from
within
the crowd. Amid all the noise and jostling around them, they could reach outward—in effect, leap over the crowd—to their goal and take it back inward. Strangely, today we're moving in the opposite direction, “upgrading” our digital gadgets in ways that make life more crowded rather than less, so that it's that much harder to open up gaps between oneself and the frantic world. At its worst, a digital screen becomes the opposite of the little mirrors, a talisman of bad energy, a portable curse.

Though the mirrors are just a metaphor for today's predicament, they led Gutenberg to something much bigger and more directly relevant to the present. In his next venture, he took the same technological principles—a press, mass production—and applied them to written communication, which, as we've seen, had its own crowd problem. Just as there hadn't been enough mirrors to satisfy popular demand, there weren't enough books to go around. As a result, most Europeans didn't have access to the inward experience that reading offered. Gutenberg rethought the technology of book production, developing a printing press with movable type that would
allow books to be made more quickly and cheaply than they were made by hand. With his first printed text, a Bible with forty-two lines per page, he gave the world something wholly new: a machine-made book with a uniform text that could be reproduced with unprecedented efficiency. Over time, this would allow far more people to read by themselves in the private way that fosters inwardness.

It was an immediate, smashing success. In 1455, some pages from Gutenberg's first run of Bibles were shown at a trade fair in Frankfurt. A man who saw them named Enea Silvio Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) wrote a letter to a high-ranking cleric, reporting that this new kind of book was remarkably easy to use, seemingly flawless. But he wasn't optimistic about getting his hands on one, because they were already a hit. “I shall try, as far as possible, to have one of these Bibles delivered for sale and I will purchase one copy for you,” he wrote. “But I am afraid that this may not be possible, both because of the distance and because, so they say, even before the books were finished, there were customers ready to buy them.”

Not everyone was thrilled with Gutenberg's creation. As today, there were pessimists and scolds who viewed new technology as a blight on civilization. In his recent book,
The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
, Robert Darnton quotes from a letter written in 1471 by an Italian scholar named Niccolò Perotti. Though he'd initially seen the printed book as a good thing, just a decade and a half into the print age, Perotti concluded it was a menace:

Like all great innovations, print spread quickly. As of 1480, there were presses operating in more than 120 European cities and towns. By 1500, this first wave of printers had churned out an estimated thirty thousand different titles and millions of copies. After centuries in which reading had been a largely outward, crowd-focused activity, the idea of having a book that one could read alone, in a completely interior fashion, turned out to be extremely powerful. Gutenberg had tapped into a hunger that was broader and deeper than anyone had anticipated.

The desire to extend this experience more widely, and perfect it, produced yet more innovations. The earliest printed books were modeled on manuscripts, which meant they were large (ideal for displaying and reading to large gatherings), beautiful, and still quite expensive to produce. But printers soon realized that there was a need for cheaper, smaller books better suited to everyday people reading just for themselves. By the early 1500s, there were pocket-sized books with new typefaces that were easier on the eye, along with other reader-friendly innovations.

The effects of this sea change in written communication were not strictly private, however, not by a long shot. In 1517, a German monk with some unorthodox theological ideas nailed his objections to various church policies and practices to a church door in Wittenberg and set off the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther had reached these views through his own reading and biblical scholarship, and over time print
technology allowed his message to reach a wide audience of readers, who in turn would read of this dramatic challenge to ecclesiastical authority and decide where they stood. Gutenberg's device played a crucial role in breaking the Church's hold on power, and in the subsequent political and social changes that would shape the modern world. The values of freedom and equality that we cherish today took root through the spread of reading and the power it conferred on individuals to think for themselves.

Of course, the book has many other strengths that have made it such a useful tool, and help explain why it has endured so far into the computer age. “[I]t has proven to be a marvelous machine,” Darnton writes,

Does any of this make Gutenberg a philosopher? Not in the traditional sense. Little is known about the man himself, and there's no evidence that he consciously set out to democratize reading. He was first and foremost a businessman or, as John Man puts it, “an early capitalist” who recognized there was money to be made in mass-producing Bibles. Nonetheless, it took a philosophical mind to step back from the challenges of the crowd in late-medieval Europe and come up with not one but two very different solutions. If Gutenberg had thought only of mass-producing the mirrors, we wouldn't know his name today. If he'd thought only of the printing press, we
would know his name but have less reason to surmise that he was consciously seeking solutions to the conundrum of the self in a crowded world. Because he had both ideas and worked at them so doggedly—he spent many years on the two ventures, borrowing money heavily along the way—it's quite possible that he was pursuing not just profits but a genuine vision.

And his work translates into ideas we can learn from today, when advertisements tout the “always-connected” life and influential technology critics praise new devices for the extent to which they broaden and speed up not just our reach but our availability, bringing the crowd ever closer in ever more dimensions of life.

When my trusty notebook computer picks up a wireless Internet signal, it tells me I'm “Connected!” and the exclamation point leaves no doubt what that means: Good news! I'm in the crowd! When there's no available signal, a red
X
appears over the wireless icon at the lower-right corner of my screen. There's no exclamation point now because this is nothing to be gleeful about. The crowd is gone. For years, I responded to the red
X
with frustration and impatience, sometimes a whispered curse and a hand slammed on the nearest hard surface. I could feel the pulse pounding in my neck as my blood pressure rose. I was a good maximalist, and there was nothing worse than losing the crowd.

I was wrong. I see that now, and I'm not the only one. It's clear that a full-time outward-focused life is unproductive, unhealthy, and unhappy in manifold ways. If you never lose the crowd, the magic never happens. We need distance and gaps, and we need them on a regular basis. Yet we press on, oblivious. Lately there's been an effort to make reading, the ultimate inward experience, more outward. Some e-reading devices allow you to toggle your attention back and forth between the
text and the rest of the digital universe—the always-connected book. Enthusiasts of this approach predict that in the future all reading will be done effectively in public. That is, we'll be navigating links, comments, and real-time messages from distant others even as we try to read, say, a terrific novel. In a way, that would be a return to the pre-Gutenberg era, when the crowd looked askance at solitary, silent readers.

It's a very good thing to have broad access to information, which is why libraries have always been so valuable, and the bigger the library, the better. For research purposes, this Google age is a wonder. But there's a difference between
access
to information and the
experience
of it. Reading evolved away from the crowd for a reason: it wasn't the best way to read. Would anyone want to be trapped in a library in which all the books on all the shelves, and all the readers at all the desks, were talking out loud simultaneously? Hopping around among competing digital distractions, it's impossible to go truly inward, to become immersed in reading to the point where the crowd falls away, an experience poet William Stafford captured nicely in the lines

The point of the new reading technologies, it often seems, is to
avoid
deep immersion, precisely because it's an activity the crowd can't influence or control and thus a violation of the iron rule of digital existence: Never be alone. Deep, private reading and thought have begun to feel subversive. A decade ago, the digital space was heralded for the endless opportunities it offered for individual expression. The question now is how truly individual—as in bold, original, unique—you can be if you never step back from the crowd. When we think
and write from within our busyness, surrounded by countless other voices, too often the result is reactive, derivative, short-shelf-life stuff.

The greatest gifts one can give to the outward world lie within. To reach them, you have to go there.

I'm not a technologist, so I can't say exactly how the outward bias of today's technologies might be changed. But the first step would be to adopt a different philosophical approach, one that acknowledges that in a busy, crowded world, less is more. That for many of life's most important and rewarding tasks, inwardness isn't just nice but essential. Perhaps on booting up, a digital device of the future might ask me how connected I want to be right now and offer various options, from alpha (less crowded, more focused) to omega (more crowded, less focused). If I chose alpha, it might then say “Choose one task” and not allow me to take on any others at the same time. A simplistic idea, perhaps, but then simplicity is what we need more of.

We're going to find it. Human beings are highly skilled at devising new ways to get away from the crowd. The recent past offers many examples. The Sony Walkman, the progenitor of today's digital music players, made the formerly outward experience of music inward and private as well as portable. Video-recording devices such as TiVo liberated the television experience from the constraints of time. Suddenly, it was no longer necessary to watch your favorite show when everyone else was or to endure those often annoying features of crowd life, commercials. The better such innovations serve the needs of the harried self, creating distance and space where there once was none, the more handsomely they're rewarded. Gutenberg's name is synonymous with the technology past, but as a business philosopher, he points straight to the future. In the long run, the smart money is on inwardness.