William Powers and Paper in the Digital Age

In 2007, William Powers wrote an essay, "Hamlet's Blackberry." The paper was a part of the Discussion Paper Series, out of Harvard University. The subtitle and underlying theme to the essay is that "... Paper Is Eternal." Powers writes:

We live in an age obsessed with new technologies. The sophisticated modern consumer knows the fine points of all the latest media devices. There are countless popular magazines dedicated to helping us stay abreast of our media devices, and they cover every imaginable kind of technology except the one on which the magazines themselves are printed. Paper is the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years, the one that has lasted the longest and had the profoundest effect on civilization. One can easily make the case that without the technology that is paper, there would be no civilization. Yet most of the time, we don’t even think of paper as a technology. And so we don’t ask the questions we routinely ask about other technologies: How does it work? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Is it easy and enjoyable to use? Paper doesn’t seem to require much consideration because it’s so simple: a thin, flexible material that reflects light, crisply displaying any marks you make on it. What more is there to say?

Find that essay here, on Harvard's servers. In July NPR's Morning Edition covered the book and author. The story's webpage prefaces the subject with a series of questions: "Do you find yourself checking Facebook as soon as you wake up in the morning? Do you answer e-mails on your Blackberry while surfing the Web? Even as you read this article, is your right index finger twitching on the mouse, just itching to click on something new?" The webpage continues: "Powers' book is not a Luddite manifesto. The writer may question the way we use our gadgets, but he certainly doesn't condemn it. ("With a few keystrokes, I can bring up an old manuscript from the British Museum. That is miraculous," he says.) He does, however, recognize the downside of constantly being flooded with new information — or what he calls the "conundrum of connectedness."" Read from that feature story's webpage here, from/on NPR.org. And download that Morning Edition podcast here. Powers was also a guest on This Week in Mobile; YouTube video below.