Hamlet’s Blackberry and Door Hinges

By a TeleRead Contributor

Editor’s Note: Occasional Teleread contributor Dan Bloom is a media observer based in Taiwan. Paul Biba

William Powers is a well-known American media critic who used to write weekly columns for the National Journal and who in 2007 published a 75-page essay for a Harvard think tank concerned with the future of newspapers and journalism. It’s eye-catching title: “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” — with the subtitle: “Why Paper is Eternal.”

You can read the essay online for free in pdf versions or print it out on paper via a simple Google search. You might wonder why Powers called his essay “Hamlet’s BlackBerry”. It has something to do with some old technology from the Middle Ages that was called an “erasable tablet” and I think Hamlet spoke of one these tablets in one of his monologues.

Mr Powers’ essay caught the attention of so many people in the newspaper and publishing industry, from editors to reporters to literary agents to book editors that, as things happen, a major New York publishing house asked him if he could expand his 75-page essay into a book-length volume. I am not sure of its publication date, but you can expect to be hearing more about it sometime in mid-2010, according to souces.

It might have the same title as the essay; it might have a completely different title, too. Meanwhile, if you haven’t read the 75 page essay yet in pdf format, by all means get your hands on it. It’s free for the taking.

Powers is, of course, a big fan and booster of paper (and paper technologies such as books and newspapers and magazines), but he also understands the Digital Age we are living in and sees the potential for E-readers and E-books as well. He is an astute observer of the media scene, and a very good writer and researcher. The essay he wrote for the Harvard think tank was excellent, as you will see when you read it, and the book will be even better. In fact, I think the book will be one of the big books of 2010. Just guessing.

Powers is pro-E-readers, too, and believes that digital can do some things better than paper, as you can see in this snippet from the [May 23, 2008] NPR interview linked to below. And see his take on how door hinges never went the way of the dodo bird, as many people had predicted they would. And see his last bolded statement below.

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/05/23/03

Hinges excerpt here:

WILLIAM POWERS: ….. there are many old-fashioned devices that people have been predicting would go away for generations. I cite a professor from California named Paul Duguid who talks about the hinge. Futurists have been predicting the death of the hinge for generations.

NPR’s BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS]

WILLIAM POWERS: Science-fiction movies since time immemorial, and stories, have always had sliding doors, doors that disappear into walls.

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS]

WILLIAM POWERS: No hinges.

BOB GARFIELD: Shoo-shoom! Yeah.

WILLIAM POWERS: Hinges are old-fashioned. Doors that are hinges take up space needlessly and so forth. And yet the hinge lives on because hinged doors do things for people that they like. They are expressive. You can slam doors. You can use doors to send messages. There’s something about hinges that continue to work for us.

And I argue in [my essay from 2007] – and I know many other people sort of feel this, I think, in their guts when they use paper – there is something about paper that really, really works that has worked for 2,000 years and it’s going to be very hard to replace it.

BOB GARFIELD: Couldn’t this all come down just to the mundane issue of cost, that it’s just a lot cheaper to do things digitally than to deforest the landscape?

WILLIAM POWERS: Yes. That could well kill off paper. I think it is already killing off certain kinds of paper media. And, in fact, I get into this in the essay. There are kinds of content that don’t require paper. And I actually think that most of what newspapers do, the breaking news function, is much better suited to digital media. And this is why people have migrated to the Web for breaking news, and are moving away from newspapers. That intuitively makes perfect sense to me.