Teen Sleuth Haunted Library

My niece, Elli, checking her iphone.

From today’s New York Times Book Review:

While reading “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” I sporadically paused to check my iPhone — whenever its ping signaled the arrival of a new e-mail message. I hated to turn away from William Powers’s elegant meditation on our obsessive connectivity and its effect on our brains and our very way of life. But I did anyway.

Powers suggests that evolutionary programming may be partly responsible for the drive that has many of us constantly checking our digital screens. We are wired by nature, he notes, to pay attention to new stimuli, thereby helping us to respond quickly to predators or to nab a potential meal. The biochemical effect of the iPhone ping, in fact, might be injecting my brain with what one scientist calls a “dopamine squirt.” In other words, marketers have told us we must be connected all the time, and our brains have done the rest. The author worries that our homes, the traditional shelter from the crowd, have been invaded to the point where we may be in danger of no longer connecting deeply with our families, our books and our thoughts.

But Powers, a former staff writer at The Washington Post who has written extensively on media and technology, is not simply an earnest foreteller of doom. He is well aware that human beings are always capable of gaining more than they lose with every new technology. It has been 25 years since the publication of Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” with its dire warning of television’s potential to erode not only public discourse but thinking itself. In Postman’s wake, we now have both Fox News, which most days represents his worst nightmare, and long-form works of art like “The Wire,” which afford us a perch to see how the world works and how we are all connected — in the same way that great storytellers and thinkers have been doing since the beginning of recorded history. Personally, I would not trade “The Wire” to get rid of Glenn Beck. Some may disagree. Continue reading →