Free Hamlet's BlackBerry by William Powers

pause and reflect. To eliminate the gaps.
    The rushed, careless quality of screen communication is of a piece with the discounting of physical togetherness. When everyone is endlessly available, all forms of human contact begin to seem less special and significant. Little by little, companionship itself becomes a commodity, cheap, easily taken for granted. A person is just another person, and there are so many of those, blah, blah, blah. Why not flee the few of the living room for the many of the screen, where all relationships are flattened into one user-friendly mosaic, a human collage that’s endlessly clickable and never demands your full attention?
    Somewhere inside, we all know this isn’t the path to happiness. My most cherished childhood memories, the ones that made me who I am and sustain me today, are about moments when a parent, grandparent, or somebody else I cared aboutput everything and everyone else aside to be with me alone , to enter my little world and let me enter theirs. In the old Doors song “Break on Through (to the Other Side),” there’s a line about finding a “country in your eyes.” We weren’t visiting one another’s countries much anymore—they were becoming foreign lands. As I watched the Vanishing Family Trick unfold and played my own part in it, I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens.
    It’s been happening for a long time now to families everywhere, and nobody seems to know how to stop it. Several years ago, Time magazine ran a cover story about children and technology that opened with this slice of life:
    It’s 9:30 p.m., and Stephen and Georgina Cox know exactly where their children are. Well, their bodies, at least. Piers, 14, is holed up in his bedroom—eyes fixed on his computer screen—where he has been logged onto a MySpace chat room and AOL Instant Messenger (IM) for the past three hours. His twin sister Bronte is planted in the living room, having commandeered her dad’s iMac—as usual. She, too, is busily IMing, while chatting on her cell phone and chipping away at homework. By all standard space-time calculations, the four members of the family occupy the same three-bedroom home in Van Nuys, Calif., but psychologically each exists in his or her own little universe.
    The gadgets and brand names change over time, but the tendency remains the same: away from the few and the near, toward the many and the far. Parents, the magazine concluded, should teach their kids “that there’s life beyond the screen.” In fact, most parents don’t need to be told that, andmany have been trying for years. They aren’t having much success because our thinking has never gotten beyond the vague notion that “there’s life” of some unspecified sort out there that’s good for you, kid, trust us, and you’d better go find some now. This is the old eat-your-brussels-sprouts argument that’s never worked for any generation, and it’s a particularly weak approach to this problem.
    Kids aren’t stupid, and they’re especially good at spotting double standards. Everything they see and hear around them tells them that the screen is where all the fun and action are and where they need to go to thrive and succeed. The occasional news report tut-tutting digital addiction can’t undo a thousand others touting the new “must-have” gadget, the social network everyone’s joining, and so on. Parents can lecture all day, but their moral authority is rooted in their own lives. What can Mom and Dad know about this alleged life beyond the screen if they themselves never go twenty minutes without a BlackBerry glance?
    The Nielsen Company reported that in one three-month period, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages each per month, which was more than twice as