Do you find yourself checking Facebook as soon as you wake up in the morning? Even as you read this article, is your right index finger twitching on the mouse, just itching to click on something new? If so, welcome to the 21st century. Without even realizing it, we’ve signed up for a life in which we’re all connected, all the time. Whether or not this is a good thing is the subject of Hamlet’s Blackberry, a new book by William Powers.
Early in the book, Powers describes a scene that should strike many as familiar: He is standing at a crosswalk in the middle of Manhattan, alongside five or eight other people—all of whom are staring intently at some digital device. “Here I was in New York, the most fantastic city in the world—so much to look at, to see and hear, and everybody around me essentially wasn’t present,” he says.
Powers may question the way we use our gadgets, but he certainly doesn’t condemn it. He does, however, recognize the downside of constantly being flooded with new information or what he calls the “conundrum of connectedness.”
Among the things that suffer from our over connectedness, Powers says, are relationships. “If we’re constantly toggling between people on Facebook and texts and all these new ways of connecting all day long, and we never have a sustained connection,” Powers says. “It’s sort of the opposite of connectedness.”
But how are we of the 21st century supposed to cope with that problem? Powers has one suggestion that’s both utterly simple and almost impossible to imagine following: just disconnect. His family, for example, takes an “Internet Sabbath” every weekend. “We turn off the household modem, and we don’t have smart phones the whole weekend. We can’t do Web surfing.” he explains.
According to Powers, the positive effects of these technology breaks are felt long after the weekends are over. “Even when we’re connected, we can feel the benefits of having been disconnected a couple days ago,” he says. “It’s just about that simple word, ‘balance’”.
Not that he thinks up plugging your modem is necessarily easy. “It’s really hard to pull away. You have to know why you’re doing it, and really believe” he says. “What I’m about here is trying to convince people that it’s worth doing.”
1.What William Powers describes in Paragraph 2（ ）.
2.The word “downside” (Para. 3) is closest in meaning to “（ ）”.
3.“Internet Sabbath” means that on this day the author’s family（ ）.
4.The author thinks that the “Internet Sabbath”（ ）.
5.The passage is most likely a（ ）.
