Months ago on Twitter, Dr Couros asked which book he should read, and one of the three he listed was called Hamlet’s Blackberry. The title intrigued me, so I’ve read it, and it has set me off on an exploration that I hope to post about on this blog.
The book itself really has three parts, with the first and third covering they whys and hows of created some disconnection in an overly connected life. While I have been doing some of this myself (leaving the computer off all day on a weekend, not getting a smart phone), I wasn’t interested in that part. The middle, however, takes ten historical figures and discussed how each responded to the extraordinary changes in information technology, from Socrates to Marshall McLuhan, with various theories and techniques designed to balance the overactivity caused by the “next new thing”.
Usually, when non-historians write history, I’m not interested. They tend to do pop culture history. But frankly, the whole area of internet-influenced culture studies is pretty pop anyway, and if a journalist like William Powers feels comfortable pulling some stuff out of the past to make a point, I’m OK with that. It’s certainly not marketed as a history of anything. Rather, Powers is looking for places in the past where people have experienced similar phenomena to what we’re experiencing now. Scholarly historians assume that perspective instead of articulating it. It was fun to have it articulated in the context of technology and culture.
Besides, I learned about wax tablets, which I had not known about. Powers claimed in, ironically, his weakest chapter, that Hamlet carried something called a “table”, a wax tablet written on with a stylus and erased with the paddle-like back end of the stylus. I had never heard of this (my historical expertise is om medieval cloth-making technology), so I went to…the internet! I found wax tablets at York, and a a list of links about wax tablets during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Good stuff, with pictures.
It seemed as though each time new information technologies “changed the world” (printing, telegraph, railroads), there was a corresponding backlash, but these were not always of the nostalgic nature. And sometimes they served to highlight, or even preserve in better form, the previous technology.
I’ve since gone on to read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and am now in the middle of the terrifying new book by Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget. I realize it might seem like I’m starting this class with a rather dystopian view of technology, but I don’t think it will turn out that way. I tend toward the idea of balance, “and” instead of “or”. And certainly such works give me a larger perspective than reading Wired magazine and pro-internet works by authors I already know and admire. So that’s how I’m starting…
Wax tablet image from http://objectlessons.org .
I’m curious, if Don Tapscott had been around at those various points in history. Would he have said that kids brains were different than in the generation before (like he does now when talking about digital natives)?
I hadn’t heard of that book, but I think I’ll have to add it to my list now. Thanks.
I’m not sure if Don Tapscott would have been published in a previous generation.
I think it is very important not to glorify technology for technology’s sake, or for it’s “newness”. You raise an excellent point about looking to the past to help interpret how we will face the future. I remember taking a class years ago on The History of the Book, and learning that medieval manuscripts have lasted much longer than 1960s paperbacks, which are already disintegrating. It’s all about the perspective.