Hamlet's BlackBerry (24 page)

CHAPTER 1: BUSY, VERY BUSY

the “movie-in-the-brain”
: Antonio R. Damasio, “How the Brain Creates the Mind,” in
Best of the Brain from Scientific American
, ed. Floyd E. Bloom (New York: Dana Press, 2007), pp. 58–67.

“It all depends”
: William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,”
On Some of Life's Ideals
(New York: Henry Holt, 1912), p. 37.13

William James acknowledged
: Ibid., pp. 3–46.

A news story
: “Teen Tops More than 300,000 Texts in Month: Sacramento Teen Says She's Popular,” www.ksbw.com, posted May 5, 2009.

New findings are released
: “Americans Spend Eight Hours a Day on Screens,” AFP (Agence France-Presse) wire story, March 27, 2009. Tim Gray, “Study: U.S. Loaded with Internet Addicts,” www.sci-tech-today.com, October 18, 2006. “Texting and Driving Worse than Drinking and Driving,” www.CNBC.com, June 25, 2009.

CHAPTER 2: HELLO, MOTHER

“Get Connected!”
:
Parade
, November 18, 2007.

“
ridiculously easy group-forming
”: Clay Shirky,
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
(New York: Penguin Press, 2008), p. 155.

an arresting television commercial
: Commercial broadcast on television, fall of 2007.

“I've been to enough Steve Jobs”
: Michael Arrington, “I Am a Member of the Cult of iPhone,” www.techcrunch.com, June 10, 2008.

Here was a device
: Frank Bruni, “Where to Eat? Ask Your iPhone,”
New York Times
, July 16, 2008; Heidi N. Moore, “Can the iPhone Really Save America?”
Wall Street Journal
, http://online.wsj.com, July 17, 2008.

“tribal experience”
: John Boudreau, “IPhone 3G: ‘Worth the Wait,'” www.mercurynews.com, July 12, 2008.

The total number
: Based on data from the International Telecommunication Union (www.itu.int) and
The World Fact Book
(Central Intelligence Agency, www.cia.gov, updated as of November 2009).

surveyed people in seventeen countries
: “The Hyperconnected: Here They Come!,” www.idc.com, 2008.

Countries are engaged
: OECD statistics on broadband growth and penetration, www.oecd.org.

Barack Obama
: The campaign quotation about broadband penetration and the postelection address are widely available online.

One reason South Korea
: OECD statistics, www.oecd.org. On gaming as obsession see, for example, the discussion of Seoul as the most connected city on earth, “Most Connected Cities,” www.dailywireless.com, March 6, 2007; and “South Korea's Gaming Addicts,” BBC News online, November 22, 2002.

CHAPTER 3: GONE OVERBOARD

I'd read a self-help book
: Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz, with Jean Own,
How to Be Your Own Best Friend
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1971); quote appears on pp. 56–57.

Paul Tillich once wrote
: Paul Tillich,
The Eternal Now
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963), pp. 17–18.

E. B. White
: E. B. White,
Here Is New York
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 13.

Alvin Toffler coined
: Alvin Toffler,
Future Shock
(New York: Bantam Books, 1984).

According to Edward Hallowell
: Sonja Steptoe, “Q & A: Defining a New Deficit Disorder,” www.time.com, January 8, 2006.

Continuous partial attention
: Phrase coined by technology expert Linda Stone; quoted definition is from www.wordspy.com. “E-mail apnea,” also attributed to Stone, is defined in “The Too-Much-Information Age,” www.yankelovich.com, August 4, 2008.

Internet addiction disorder
: In the March 2008 issue of the
American Journal of Psychiatry
, Dr. Jerald J. Block wrote, “Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder.” Block's claim was widely reported. See, e.g., Andy Bloxham, “Internet Addiction Is a ‘Clinical Disorder,'” www.telegraph.co.uk, June 20, 2008.

nomophobia
: “Nomophobia Is the Fear of Being out of Mobile Phone Contact—and It's the Plague of Our 24/7 Age,” www.thisislondon.co.uk, posted March 31, 2008.

Time
magazine
: Claudia Wallis, “The Multitasking Generation,”
Time
, March 19, 2006.

The Nielsen Company reported
: See, e.g., Katie Hafner, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll,”
New York Times
, May 26, 2009.

true headline
: Dave Carlin, “Teen Girl Falls in Open Manhole While Texting,” www.wcbstv.com, July 11, 2009.

nature-deficit disorder
: Richard Louv,
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2006).

writer Lowell Monke
: Lowell Monke, “Unplugged Schools,”
Orion
, September/October 2007, www.orionmagazine.org.

By 2009, people over thirty-five
: See, e.g., Claire Cain Miller, “What's Driving Twitter's Popularity? Not Teens,”
New York Times
, August 26, 2009.

why you can sit in a café
: The café scenario I use to illustrate how the mind juggles tasks (or doesn't) was inspired by an analogy drawn by Christopher F. Chabris in “You Have Too Much Mail,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 15, 2008.

By some estimates
: Studies by Basex, www.basex.com.

It's estimated
: Ibid.

The brain is the most
: Daniel Tammet,
Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind
(New York: Free Press, 2009), p. 7.

“the sustained attention of the genius”
: William James, “Attention,” in
Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals
(Charleston, S.C.: BiblioBazaar, 2007), p. 70.

One of the sharpest observers
: Jen Sorensen,
Slowpoke
strip,
Funny Times
, June 2009.

One study by Basex
: www.basex.com.

“the world's greatest challenge”
: From a statement issued by the Xerox Corporation about the founding of the Information Overload Research Group.

“We will be happy to serve you”
: Hand-lettered sign in the café at the Providence, Rhode Island, Amtrak station.

“a symbolical mental liberation”
: Risto Etelamaki, quoted but not named on National Public Radio, August 26, 2008; and by name in Agnieszka Flak, “Ants Bite, Phones Fly in Finnish Summer Bonanza,” www.reuters.com, August 26, 2008.

“You won't find a television”
: Jeryl Brunner, “10 Unplugged Vacations,” www.forbestraveler.com, June 26, 2008.

CHAPTER 4: SOLUTIONS THAT AREN'T

launched a new ad campaign
: Gates-Seinfeld commercial broadcast on television, fall of 2008.68
Wired.com, for instance
: Brandon Keim, “Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains,” www.wired.com, February 6, 2009.

“Warning”
: L. Gordon Crovitz, “Unloading Information Overload,” http://online.wsj.com, July 7, 2008.

The Takeaway: Broadcast of May 22, 2009; listener's audio comment posted at www.thetakeaway.org.

“There's a competitive advantage”
: IBM researcher John Tang, quoted in Matt Richtel, “Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast,”
New York Times
, June 14, 2008, p. A1.

“up to 950 words a minute”
: Randall Stross, “The Daily Struggle to Avoid Burial by E-Mail,”
New York Times
, April 20, 2008, Sunday Business section, p. 5.

A popular self-help book
: Timothy Ferriss,
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2007), pp. 114–16.

The human brain is wired
: My discussion of the brain and attention issues benefited greatly from conversations
with Christopher F. Chabris, Ph.D., of the psychology department at Union College.

“dopamine squirt”
: John Ratey, associate professor of psychiatry, Harvard University, quoted in Matt Richtel, “Driven to Distraction,”
New York Times
, July 19, 2009, p. A1.

writes psychologist Steven Pinker
: Steven Pinker, “Will the Mind Figure Out How the Brain Works?”
Time
, April 10, 2000.

Antonio Damasio
: Antonio R. Damasio, “How the Brain Creates the Mind,” in
Best of the Brain from Scientific American
, ed. Floyd E. Bloom (New York: Dana Press, 2007), p. 61.

technologies of the self
: Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in
Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault
, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 16.

“Turn off your computer”
: Eric Schmidt's commencement speech was widely reported on in the news media, for example: Kathy Matheson, “Google CEO Urges Grads: ‘Turn off your computer,'” Associated Press, May 18, 2009.

CHAPTER 5: WALKING TO HEAVEN

I relied mostly on the translation of Plato's
Phaedrus
by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff in
Plato: Complete Works
, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997). All quotes are from this version, except in two places where I preferred Benjamin Jowett's nineteenth-century translation. The Jowett quotes are from
Symposium and Phaedrus
(New York: Dover, 1993). I made these choices based not on the faithfulness of the translation (I don't know ancient
Greek) but on the meaning in English and how it related to my particular topic. Unless I specifically cite Jowett, all citations of
Phaedrus
refer to the Nehamas-Woodruff version. There is one word, “scroll,” that does not appear in either of these translations but does in some others, and I use it for the reasons explained below.

a young man
: According to some sources, Phaedrus would have been closer to middle age at the time the actual conversation took place. Since Socrates calls him a “boy,” I assume here that he was in fact young.

“Phaedrus, my friend!”
: Plato,
Phaedrus
, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in
Plato: Complete Works
, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), p. 507.

“it's more refreshing”
: Ibid., p. 507.

“you never even set foot”
: Ibid., p. 510.

“Forgive me, my friend”
: Ibid., p. 510.

In fact, this is the only one:
John M. Cooper, introduction to ibid., p. 506.

“They invented
talking”: E. H. Gombrich,
A Little History of the World
, trans. Caroline Mustill (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 7.

“the greatest inventors of all time”
: Ibid., p. 5.

“He denied that he had discovered”
: John M. Cooper, introduction to
Plato: Complete Works
, p. xix.

Some translations
: Though both the Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff translation and the Benjamin Jowett use “book,” other translations use “scroll.” I prefer the latter because the word “book” brings to mind the familiar codex of our own time, which wouldn't be invented for several hundred years.

“the place beyond heaven”
:
Phaedrus
, p. 525.

“is inevitably a painfully”
: Ibid., p. 524.

“trampling and striking”
: Ibid., p. 526.

“pure knowledge”
: Ibid., p. 525.

“The result is terribly noisy”
: Ibid., p. 526.

“There's something really divine”
: Ibid., p. 517.

He tells a story
: Ibid., pp. 551–52.

“remember it from the inside”
: Ibid., p. 552.

“[T]hey will be tiresome”
: Plato,
Symposium and Phaedrus
, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Dover, 1993), p. 88.

“stand there as if”
:
Phaedrus
, p. 552.

“continues to signify”
: Ibid., p. 552.

“lovely, pure and clear”
: Ibid., p 509.

“this thing we are carrying around”
: Ibid., p. 528.

“Beloved Pan”
: Plato,
Symposium and Phaedrus
, trans. Jowett, p. 92.

CHAPTER 6: THE SPA OF THE MIND

All quotations from Seneca's letters to Lucilius are from
Letters from a Stoic
, translated by Robin Campbell. After the first reference below, I refer to this book simply as
Letters.

He was born
: Biographical information about Seneca comes from two sources: Miriam T. Griffin,
Seneca: A
Philosopher in Politics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), and Robin Campbell's introduction to his translation of Seneca's letters.

“the real master of the world”
: Pierre Grimal,
The Civilization of Rome
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), p. 497.