Free Hamlet's BlackBerry by William Powers Page A

many as a year earlier. This was viewed as shocking news, seized on as the cause of rampant distraction in school, failing grades, and numerous other ills. What’s far more shocking is that we were shocked at all. Of course children are texting like crazy. Of course they spend so much of the day huddled with screens, they’re barely aware of the third dimension (true headline: “Teen Girl Falls in Open Manhole While Texting”) and increasingly unfamiliar with the natural world—nature-deficit disorder, it’s now being called. This is how we grown-ups are teaching them to live, implicitly and explicitly, with a conviction they can’t fail to miss.
    Educator and writer Lowell Monke shared with his studentsa troubling study that showed that many young people prefer to interact with machines rather than directly with human beings. The next day, one of the students sent him an e-mail explaining why this might be:
    I do feel deeply disturbed when I can run errand after errand, and complete one task after another with the help of bank clerks, cashiers, postal employees, and hairstylists without ANY eye contact at all! After a wicked morning of that, I am ready to conduct all business online.
    â€œIn a society in which adults so commonly treat each other mechanically,” Monke writes, “perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that our youth are more attracted to machines.” We believe in our screens so much, we’ve placed them at the center of our lives, so why shouldn’t they? If anything, the kids deserve merit badges for doing their best to emulate the values and norms of their community and their elders—to be more like us.
    For years, conventional wisdom held it was the young, the so-called digital natives, who were leading the way into the connected future, with grown-ups reluctantly tagging along. This notion was based on hard statistics about relative technology usage by various age groups and an abundance of anecdotal evidence. Younger people are always comfortable with the new technologies of their own era because to them the devices aren’t “new” in the way they are to those who can remember a world without them. Kids took digital screens in stride just as their parents took TV screens in stride decades earlier: the gadgets were there in front of them, and they did interesting things—what’s the big deal? However, as with television fifty years ago, today’s children didn’t purchase the first screens they encountered as toddlers. This revolution wasstarted by grown-ups, and if many older people were initially slower to adopt the digital life wholesale, they’ve played an excellent game of catch-up. By 2009, people over thirty-five were driving the growth of then-cutting-edge digital tools such as Twitter, giving the lie to the youth paradigm.
    In the end, this isn’t about any one generation. The girl who sent 300,000 texts in a month didn’t make the news because she was young or some kind of freak. She made the news because she represented, in slightly exaggerated fashion, how everyone, regardless of age, now lives. When you hear a middle-ager bellyaching that “these kids” don’t make a move without their screens and barely know how to conduct a face-to-face conversation, they’re really talking about themselves. We’ve all immersed ourselves in one very particular mode of connectedness, to the point of obsession and pulled away from all other modes. Why? Because to share time and space with others in the fullest sense, you have to disconnect from the global crowd. You have to create one of those gaps where thoughts, feelings, and relationships take root. And for a good maximalist, there’s nothing worse than a gap.
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    I F THERE’S ANYWHERE one would expect maximalism to have no downside whatsoever, it’s in the most outward dimension of life, the bustling world of work and business. The