Recently I finished William Powers’ book Hamlet’s Blackberry, and I’ve blogged a little about it here. Powers’ argument rang true for me, and I think for many of his ideal readers, those of us who came to the digital age having already experienced the pre-digital, analog age of books without Kindles and screens without Internets attached to them. (I suppose the real test would be those who grew up with screens that were designed to keep bugs out of your house, and not screens that could have bugs build into them).

To whit: we are too busy. We are too connected, all the time. We are becoming superficial, a nation of titty Tweeters and fanatic Facebookers. We lack depth in most of what we do. We are always distracted. Life moves by way too fast, even when we try to slow it down. We are becoming addicted to our electronic prosthetics. And in order to confront this, we need to find ways to disconnect from the 24/7 connected lifestyle, literally (days off from the internet and cell phone) and figuratively (turning to thoughtful mentors like Plato, Seneca, Ben Franklin, Thoreau and Emerson for ways to balance our lives, find depth and grace and peace, and achieve the “good life”).

I in fact have been writing about these very themes. I love Facebook in a limited, “let’s not get too involved” kind of way; I post albums, glance at what my friends and my “friends” (those of the second third and fourth circles of friend/acquaintance-ship so familiar to the socially networked) are saying, or commenting on. I don’t Twitter (something offputting about a word whose base is twit) but you can see twitter behavior in a lot of my texting: I do text-ku (short poems in text), I send slices of my day to selected friends and family, I encourage those select few to send amusing pictures and anecdotes, I keep tabs on my 15 year old skater teen (sometimes by texting his friends, who apparently have not left their phone at home or failed to charge the damn thing).

In short, I am the one my other less connected self warned me about; I’m the ideal audience for Powers’ reading- and history-enhanced argument. And yet. Perhaps it was Powers using Ben Franklin to teach me about positive rituals in my life. I teach Franklin, and my students often love his apparently straightforward list (made at a tender age) for achieving moral perfection: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality and so on. I couldn’t help thinking of Gatsby, and his Franklin-like list of moral improvements as he tried to ascend the class system and gain entry into the Good Life of the roaring 20s. It is the whole notion of self improvement, of self-help, that Franklin helped start, or put his American and quaker stamp on. Perhaps it is unfair to saddle this most humorous and sanguine of Founding Fathers with the paternity of The Dance of Anger and Codependent No More.

And then today I came upon a terrific article in The Nation (Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/159279/my-monster-my-self-nicholas-carr-and-william-powers) on both Powers and Nicholas Carr (author of a similar polemic against the Internet generation, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains). The author, Gary Greenberg, does everything I’ve done: seen the validity of the criticism; interrogates the self-help-iness of the genre; identified his own epiphany regarding cell phones (in this case, as a therapist, the moment he takes the everpresent cell phone from a 15 year old named Kate in his office). In fact, his epiphany sets up the point I want to emphasize:

“Why?” she demanded.

“Because I have a really hard time concentrating when you’re distracted,” I said. “I keep wondering what’s going on on your phone, and I figure that whatever it is must be more interesting than what’s going on in here.”

“Well, that’s for sure.”

“I’m certain that’s true,” I said. “Nothing here can compete with what’s on your phone. But sometimes we have to pay attention to less interesting things.” I reached out my hand, and she put the phone in it. It was warm and moist. I thought I could feel the indentation of her fingers on its rounded edges. “It seems almost like this phone is part of you,” I said as I put it on my desk. “Like another limb or something.”

“No duh,” she said. “It is.” She held my eyes. There was no shame or defensiveness in them now, let alone fear. Just contempt. It wasn’t the first time a kid had made me out to be a fossil…But the gap between Kate and me wasn’t cultural or political in origin. It had to do with different ideas about what kind of creatures we are. My comment, which I’d made for no particular reason, hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know—that she was in some fundamental way different from me, and from the rest of the grown-ups with whom she had to share the planet. We had only four limbs. She had five, and with that extra appendage she could reach out of her tiny, bounded self and into the whole wide world—or at least the world that could blink to life on her screen.

His point is that both Powers and Carr preach to the converted, to those who sense a loss as well as a gain with cell phones and laptops and all of it. They aren’t wrong. Their points about pre-digital practices, especially the self-creating practice of (a certain kind of) reading, are well taken. But the Kate generation may or may not find these nostalgias for a time when reading could happen without any possibility of YouTube or MySpace or the digital tweet of a cellphone bird…well, they may or may not find them simply nostalgic, like wishing we hadn’t had Reagan or destroyed most of the best parts of the New Deal.

Instead, Greenberg replays a kind of Digital Divide, one in which authors like Power, like Carr, like – well – like me, can’t really delve into the heart of some universal Cyborg with a cell phone, because my cell phone is grafted onto my analog skin, and the seams show. Whereas…there is no seam on my son’s skin, no seam between him and the cell phone and Facebook. We are like prosthetic gods, as Freud said, but perhaps what is prosthetic for me has become organic, in important ways, for my son’s generation. And as the article ends, it makes a potent point: the generation for whom 24/7 connectivity is as natural as radio and television were for me will not have these regrets, but ones of their own, different ones:

Our future selves may have Bluetooth implants and pointed thumbs and, who knows, eyes on the tops of their heads. What are prostheses for us will have grown seamlessly onto them, but they will have new seams to contend with. Self-help may no longer come in the form of books, but it will be necessary all the same, for those future selves will have their own discontents, their own monsters, their own lost pasts to mourn.

What do I think of this argument? I think it has some power; it matters what self is writing the self help book. But I also think that my experience of having lived in an analog world may also have something to offer to those who are fish in the waters of connectivity. If we were to draw a Venn diagram, there would be some significant overlap of cell phone use and abuse, video games and their discontents, the always already sense that distraction, like our shadow, follows us down the avenue. And when we are alone and feeling blue, we’ll do what Plato, Seneca, Franklin, McLuhan and the rest have done: we’ll use language, even if augmented cyborgian language, to find our way home, and know it for the first time.