Hamlet's BlackBerry Quotes

“In a multi-tasking world where pure focus is harder and harder to come by, paper’s seclusion from the Web is an emerging strength. There’s nothing like holding a sheaf of beautifully designed pages in your hands. The whole world slows down, and your mind with it.”
― William_Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

“Someday, it will be hard to remember why we were once so fired up about 3G connectivity and the wonders of mobile broadband. Seamless, lightning-fast connectedness will be a given everywhere on Earth, and today's gadgets will be quaint museum pieces. At that point, all we'll care about is what kind of life these devices have created for us. And if it isn't a good life, we'll wonder what we did wrong.”
― William_Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

“The greatest gifts you can give to the outward world lie within. To reach them, you have to go there.”
― William_Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

“Rather than allowing external forces to define how we feel inside, each of us can be our own thermostat.”
― William_Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

“And we’re losing something of great value, a way of thinking and moving through time that can be summed up in a single word: depth. Depth of thought and feeling, depth in our relationships, our work and everything we do. Since depth is what makes life fulfilling and meaningful, it’s astounding that we’re allowing this to happen.”
― William Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

“We’re physical creatures who perceive and know the world through our bodies, yet we now spend much of our time in a universe of disembodied information. It doesn’t live here with us, we just peer at it through a two-dimensional screen. At a very deep level of the consciousness, this is arduous and draining.”
― William Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: a practical philosophy for building a good life in the digital age

“Not everyone was thrilled with Gutenberg’s creation. As today, there were pessimists and scolds who viewed new technology as a blight on civilization. In his recent book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, Robert Darnton quotes from a letter written in 1471 by an Italian scholar named Nic-colò Perotti. Though he’d initially seen the printed book as a good thing, just a decade and a half into the print age, Perotti concluded it was a menace: I see that things turned out quite differently from what I had hoped. Because now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would best be forgotten, or, better still be erased from all books. And even when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.”
― William Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: a practical philosophy for building a good life in the digital age

“Someone you know has just seen a great movie. Someone else had an idle thought. There’s been a suicide bombing in South Asia. Stocks soared today. Pop star has a painful secret. Someone has a new opinion. Someone is in a taxi. Please support this worthy cause. He needs that report from you—where is it? Someone wants you to join the discussion. A manhunt is on for the killers. Try this in bed. Someone’s enjoying sorbet, mmmm. Your account is now overdue. Easy chicken pot pie. Here’s a brilliant analysis. Latest vids from our African safari! Someone responded to your comment. Time’s running out, apply now. This is my new hair. Just heard an awesome joke. Someone is working hard on his big project. They had their baby! Click here for the latest vote count…”
― William Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

“What matters most is engagement, being conscious that you’re shaping your own experience every moment. If you spend most of your time pressing keys and managing electronic traffic, that’s what your life will be about. Maybe that makes you happy. If not, you have other options.”
― William Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: a practical philosophy for building a good life in the digital age

“Psychologists tell us that when you abandon a mental task to attend to an interruption, your emotional and cognitive engagement with the main task immediately begins to decay, and the longer and more distracting the interruption, the harder it is to reverse this process. By”
― William Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: a practical philosophy for building a good life in the digital age

“What matters most is engagement, being conscious that you're shaping your own experience every moment. If you spend most of your life pressing keys and managing electronic traffic, that's what your life will be about. Maybe that makes you happy. If not, you have other options.”
― William_Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age