Hamlet's BlackBerry (25 page)

“It is not the man”
: Seneca,
Letters from a Stoic
, trans. Robin Campbell (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 34.

“from all directions”
:
Letters
, p. 125.

“You ask me”
: Ibid., p. 41.

“the restless energy”
: Ibid., p. 36.

“All this hurrying”
: Ibid., p. 189.

“The man who spends his time”
: Ibid., p. 186.

A Roman bookseller
: Harold A. Innis,
Empire and Communications
, rev. Mary Q. Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), p. 106.

“skip from one to another”
:
Letters
, p. 33.

“Food that is vomited up”
: Ibid., p. 33.

Seneca tells the story
: Ibid., pp. 73–75.

“Measure your life”
: Ibid., p. 160.

“It's about treating”
: Winifred Gallagher,
Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
(New York: Penguin Press, 2009), p. 53.

“After running over”
:
Letters
, p. 34.

“I cannot for the life of me”
: Ibid., p. 109.

“Picture me”
: Ibid.

street sounds:
Ibid., pp. 109–10.

“I swear I no more notice”
: Ibid., p. 110.

“able at will”
: Ibid., p. 186.

“inward detachment”
: Ibid., p. 112.

What Seneca describes
: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), pp. 2–6 and p. 49.

Queen Elizabeth I
: Robin Campbell, introduction to
Letters
, p. 25, and related note, p. 238.

Gadgets now exist
: One example is a downloadable add-on called Readability, http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/ readability.

CHAPTER 7: LITTLE MIRRORS

“Even better”
: Anita Hamilton, “The iPhone: Second Time's a Charm,” www.time.com, July 14, 2008.

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

“The store's entrance was besieged”
: Connie Guglielmo and Pavel Alpeyev, “Apple's New IPhone Debut Draws Crowds, Helicopters,” www.bloomberg.com, July 11, 2008.

Saint Augustine
: Alberto Manguel,
A History of Reading
(New York: Viking, 1996), pp. 41–51.

“oral skill”
: Ibid., p. 47.

In 1432
: My account of the Aachen pilgrimages relies principally on two sources: John Man,
Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), and Albert Kapr,
Johann Gutenberg: The Man and His Invention
, trans. Douglas Martin (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996).

“as if it were”
: Man,
Gutenberg
, p. 63.

“You could head for home”
: Ibid.

“no doubt command”
: Victor Scholderer,
Johann Gutenberg: The Inventor of Printing
(London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1963), p. 10.

A man who saw them:
Manguel,
A History of Reading
, pp. 133–34.

In his recent book
: Robert Darnton,
The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
(New York: Public Affairs, 2009), pp. xiv–xv.

“
[I]t has proven”
: Ibid., p. 68.

“an early capitalist”
: Man,
Gutenberg
, p. 8.

“Closing the book”:
The quoted lines are from Stafford's poem “An Afternoon in the Stacks.” www.williamstafford.org.

CHAPTER 8: HAMLET'S BLACKBERRY

All quotations from Shakespeare in this chapter are from Stephen Greenblatt, general ed.,
The Norton Shakespeare
(New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). Since these are well known, I have not included specific references for each one. All notes citing Greenblatt refer to his Shakespeare biography,
Will in the World.

“the London crowd”
: Stephen Greenblatt,
Will in the World
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), p. 169.

“the livid and decaying heads”
: Mark Twain,
The Prince and the Pauper
(New York: Modern Library, 2003), p. 64.

“the poet of the human race”
: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Shakespeare; or, the Poet,” from
Representative Men
in
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures
, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 717.

In certain cases, accused criminals
: Greenblatt,
Will in the World
, p. 171.

those who lived through
: See Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550–1700,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
64 (2003), pp. 11–28; and Blair's forthcoming
Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010).

“collecting pieces of poetry”
: Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet's Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,”
Shakespeare Quarterly
55, no. 4 (2004), pp. 380–419.

Users spoke effusively
: All material about the popularity of tables, including the Montaigne and Sharpham quotations, is from ibid.

“Time has given the hinge”
: Paul Duguid discusses the hinge in “Material Matters: Aspects of the Past and the Futurology of the Book,” in
The Future of the Book
, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 63–102.

“The advent of printing”
: Peter Stallybrass, Michael Mendle, and Heather Wolfe, text of brochure for “Technologies in the Age of Print,” exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., September 28, 2006–February 17, 2007.

“To make cleane your Tables”
: Ibid.

embodied interaction
: On embodiment and technology, I am indebted to the work of Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper, the authors of
The Myth of the Paperless Office
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003); Moin Rahman of the Motorola Corporation; Tom Djajadiningrat of Philips Design; and Professor Kees Overbeeke of Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.

“intense representation of inwardness”
: Greenblatt,
Will in the World
, p. 323.

CHAPTER 9: INVENTING YOUR LIFE

For background information about Benjamin Franklin's life and times, I relied on three sources: Franklin,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
; Walter Isaacson,
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
; and Carl Van Doren,
Benjamin Franklin
. Any reference specific to one of these books is noted below.

“Withdraw it even for a day”
: Sue Shellenbarger, “A Day Without Email Is Like…,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 11, 2007, p. D1.

“One of the fundamental sentiments”
: Walter Isaacson,
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 50.

On the long voyage
: The story of the card cheat and resulting journal entry are from Carl Van Doren,
Benjamin Franklin
(New York: Viking Press, 1938), pp. 61–62.

“I have never fixed”
: Ibid., p. 63.

two fictional dialogues
: Dialogue excerpts are from ibid., pp. 83–87.

“Franklin's powers”
: Ibid., p. 782.

“follow the Example”
: Benjamin Franklin,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
in
Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings
, ed. J.A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 651.

“He made a list”
: D. H. Lawrence,
Studies in Classic American Literature
(New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 17.

Intel has devoted
: Jonathan B. Spira and Cody Burke, “Intel's War on Information Overload: A Case Study,” www.basex.com.

“Information overload”
: Jonathan B. Spira, “A Day Without E-mail,” www.basexblog.com, December 9, 2009.

“All new tools”
: Franklin,
Autobiography
, p. 378.

CHAPTER 10: THE WALDEN ZONE

“I went to the woods”
: Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
in
Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau
, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 81.

“I love to be alone”
: Ibid., p. 122.

“The mass of men”
: Ibid., p. 7.

A brand-new track
: Robert D. Richardson, Jr.,
Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 137–39.

“learned that his heart”
: Ibid., p. 136.

“It would be some advantage”
: Thoreau,
Walden
, p. 10.

“it was clear to him”
: Richardson,
Henry Thoreau
, p. 153.

“A slender wire”
: “The Telegraph,” unsigned editorial,
New York Times
, September 14, 1852; accessed online at www.nytimes.com.

“The merchant goes home”
: Tom Standage,
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers
(New York: Berkley Books, 1999), p. 166.

“But lo!”
: Thoreau,
Walden
, p. 33.

“pretty toys”
: Ibid., pp. 46–47.

“As I went under”
: Thoreau, journal entry, September 3, 1851, in
The Heart of Thoreau's Journals
, ed. Odell Shepard (New York: Dover, 1961), p. 57.

“the very best lead pencils”
: Henry Petroski,
The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 4.

“We are eager to tunnel”
: Thoreau,
Walden
, p. 47.

“Why should we live”
: Ibid., p. 83.

“Surface meets surface”
: Thoreau, “Life Without Principle,” in Atkinson, ed.,
Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau
, pp. 723–24.

“the voices”
: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” from
Essays: First Series
, in
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures
, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 261.

“My life is superficial”
: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist” in
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures
), p. 205.

“Simplify, simplify”
: Thoreau,
Walden
, p. 82.

“By simplifying our outward lives”
: Thoreau,
Letters to a Spiritual Seeker
, ed. Bradley P. Dean (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 21.

“I love society”
: Thoreau,
Walden
, p. 127.

“fewer came to see me”
: Ibid., p. 130.

“I went about my business”
: Ibid., pp. 137–38.

“I had three chairs”
: Ibid., p. 127.

“So easy it is”
: Ibid., p. 129.

“It is something”
: Ibid., p. 81.

Gandhi
: Richardson,
Henry Thoreau
, pp. 316–17.

“a backyard laboratory”
: Ibid., p. 171.

“All thoroughly satisfactory”
: Dorothy J. Field,
The Human House
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), p. 17.

“You think that I am”
: Thoreau, journal entry, February 8, 1857, in
The Heart of Thoreau's Journals
, p. 173.

CHAPTER 11: A COOLER SELF

“involuntarily altered”
: Marshall McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 183.

“
For life today in America”
: Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
Gift from the Sea
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), p. 20.

“Man the tool-making animal”
: McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy
, p. 4.

“inner direction”
: Ibid., p. 28.

“a total field of interacting events”
: Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), p. 248.

“Technologies create new environments”
: W. Terrence Gordon, “Terrence Gordon on Marshall McLuhan and What He Was Doin',”
The Beaver
84 (2), May 2004.

“instead of being pushed around”
: McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy
, p. 6.

“My suggestion”
: Ibid., p. 35.

“Now the point of this myth”
: McLuhan,
Understanding Media
, p. 41.