Reaction To Hamlets Blackberry

997 Words4 Pages
“It’s more refreshing to walk the country roads than city streets” A few days ago a dunk by a local high school basketball player shocked the nation of sports. Devin Thomas of Central Dauphin High School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania shattered the backboard after an alley-oop dunk in the 3rd quarter of the Mid-Penn championship game. Within seconds phone calls, texts, pictures, Twitter trends, and Facebook news feeds were filled with information about this amazing dunk. Within the hour the same dunk was being played on Sportscenter’s top plays of the day. Word travels fast in today’s world of advancing technology compared to the slow-pace days of fifth century B.C. William Powers’ book Hamlet’s Blackberry compares and contrasts the modern use of devices with the technological changes of the past. He accomplishes this by viewing the life of Socrates and Plato in the fifth chapter called Walking to Heaven. Powers’ viewpoints on the importance of distance and written language in modern times compared to the days of ancient Greece are exceptional. This particular chapter of Hamlets Blackberry emphasizes the importance of distance and also draws attention to written language as a new form of communication. The story that Powers’ tells involves a young student of Socrates named Phaedrus and their walk out of the city of Athens. Phaedrus had just got done listening to a speech by Lysias and wanted to tell Socrates all about it (Powers 84). As the two scholars stroll out of the city Socrates is skeptical of the idea. When the men make their way to a stream, Socrates is ready to hear the speech but demands that it be word for word, not summarized. Phaedrus proceeded to pull out a scroll with the speech written onto it. “Phaedrus’ scroll was roughly what a cell phone was around the year 1985, a technology still in the early stages of adoption and not yet fully
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