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Our discombobulated Internet Age could learn important new tricks from
some very old thinkers, according to this incisive critique of online
life and its discontents. Journalist Powers bemoans the reigning dogma
of digital maximalism that requires us to divide our attention between
ever more e-mails, text messages, cellphone calls, video streams, and
blinking banners, resulting, he argues, in lowered productivity and a
distracted life devoid of meaning and depth.
In a nifty and refreshing
turn, he looks to ideas of the past for remedies to this hyper-modern
predicament: to Plato, who analyzed the transition from the ancient
technology of talking to the cutting-edge gadgetry of written scrolls;
to Shakespeare, who gave Hamlet the latest in Elizabethan information
apps, an erasable notebook; to Thoreau, who carved out solitary spaces
amid the press of telegraphs and railroads.
The author sometimes lapses
into mysticism—In solitude we meet not just ourselves but all other
selves—and his solutions, like the weekend-long Internet Sabbaths he and
his wife decreed for their family, are small-bore. But Powers deftly
blends an appreciation of the advantages of information technology and a
shrewd assessment of its pitfalls into a compelling call to disconnect.
