Tag: digital culture

Balancing Your Physical and Virtual Life (Tip #1)

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Da-ding, Da-ding!  Is that your phone notification of something incoming?  Hadn’t you better check it?

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Over the past few years, as more people utilize smart phones for instant access to information and communication, I keep running into the same concerns.  Time and time again, a new smart phone owner will tell me “It has changed my life!”  Then, I observe them exit our physical reality to enter the “other places” that await us on mobile devices: news sites, social media, photos, memes, content creation tools, curation applications and innovation entertainment activities- just to name a few.

We all see it everywhere we look….people staring into screens.  Yet, what do we reach for the moment we awaken each day?  Our phones.  How do we feel when we forget our phone at home?  I have heard people say they feel everything from vulnerability to actual fear.  

Just where IS everyone heading?  I took this picture on the bus because everyone near me was on a mobile device.  Nobody was “on the bus” with me!

Eric Pickersgill, an artist who photographs digital culture, shares some haunting images at Removed.  We all see people “removed from our world” every day.  I have heard jokes about the zombies around us- people who are not really with us.

My daughter, a tech savvy creative and intelligent young woman, recently suggested I write a blog post with tips on balancing physical and virtual life!  She had not heard of FOMO and realized she had personally felt that sensation (FOMO= fear of missing out) that her phone was beckoning her to a world beyond….a world where important things were happening.  The world beyond our physical surroundings, on our digital devices, takes us to a place where boredom no longer exists and where we can be both active and passive with no rules or constrictions.  Yet, deep in our souls, we feel a slight discomfort (if not horror) knowing that we can never master keeping up with the incoming and never really exit the small reality of our tiny individual life.

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Which leads me to…

BALANCE TIP #1 Intentional Disconnection Time

Find a time to leave your device and do not touch it!  Schedule yourself a PHYSICAL WORLD ONLY time, if only an hour a day.  During that time, focus on physical reality:  deep breaths, trees, textures, hot tea, smiles, and your five senses.

You could add prayer, yoga, meditation, or a walk outdoors, or even housework!  But, the idea here is to be consciously disconnected.  While connecting with others across distance is an amazing new opportunity, it can overtake and overwhelm us unless we can find a balance between the physical and the virtual world.

Contemplate your disconnection time.  This may seem too obvious or too easy.  But it really isn’t when you think about it.  Our phones are always with us and it takes intentional effort to disconnect for a period of time. More tips to come!

Conversation in the Digital Age (Part One)

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I just finished reading Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation which was chock full of truisms and presents a challenge to all of us to consider how we communicate. She makes a case for setting limits on technology tools, particularly our phones, and taking a good look at the value and importance of real voices and human eye contact in face to face conversation. Turkle believes students today lack empathy for others because our constant connectivity in digital spaces reduces friendship to a “performance” rather than a relationship.

In addition to the preference of texting over talking and the performance of “an edited life” on social media, young people are bombarded by information all around them and have grown up in a state of distraction. Television increasingly brings us BREAKING NEWS with a constant crawl on non-related topics scrolling across the screen and dramatic special effects hyping what is suppose to inform us.

Breaking News
Breaking News

Not only are we now comfortable with constant distraction, we consider nonstop interruption a normal state of affairs as our devices ding and beep in our pockets. Turkle says, “We forget how unusual this has become, that many young people are growing up without ever having experienced unbroken conversations either at the dinner table or when they take a walk with parents or friends. For them, phones have always come along” p. 16.

Are you concerned about the effects of mobile devices and where global digital participatory culture is heading? Do you feel like you have a handle on balancing your “digital double” (Turkle’s term for our online selves)?

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The ideas in Turkle’s latest book are worthy of our attention. Stay tuned for part two and more discussion on this critical topic.
Photos from https://www.flickr.com/photos/rubbercat/208330144/in/photostream/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/clanlife/6369791755

War and Peace: Reflection on Literature in the Digital Age -Part 1

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I just finished reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  For real.  I guess last night when I read the final page, it was a bit like reaching the top of the print version of Mount Everest. Having accomplished this literary feat, I certainly have enough material floating around in my head to reflect upon in more than one blog post. You may never read this novel, but feel free to join me and reflect on what it meant, what it means, and what it may mean in the future.

The first question is: Why?

Why read War and Peace, the historical fiction novel written way back in 1869, which is often referenced whenever we speak of something super long and boring?

I simply decided to read War and Peace before it is too late.  I will explain.

Back in 2011, I happened upon Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and his insights validated my own feelings that I was losing a grip on how to deeply focus.  We still read as much as we ever did, but in little snippets of skimming blogs and posts and scrolling through content on our mobile devices.

Several references about our lack of ability to read and absorb long passages of text were made by Nicholas Carr.  Bruce Friedman, a medical school faculty pathologist at the University of Michigan, is quoted in The Shallows, stating, “I can’t read War and Peace anymore.  I’ve lost the ability to do that.  Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it. (Carr, 2011, p.7)”  (Are you still with me? You have passed the three or four paragraph mark. I dare you to finish this blog post.  And you don’t have to read War and Peace- I promise.)

Carr also quotes Clay Shirky, digital media scholar at NYU, suggesting in a 2008 blog post, “No one reads War and Peace.  It’s too long, and not so interesting (Carr, 2011, p.111).” He goes on to explain long novels of the past are not worth the time invested and “were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access”.

Today, we have access to live information on a global scale at our fingertips and in our pockets.  We can view millions and millions of youtube videos, instagram photos, tweets, and memes created by people all over the globe. Are we really “information rich”? Carr raised this question with the warning that thoughtful people may “…slip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines online life” (p. 112). In 2011, I took that warning very seriously and I still do.

So, I read War and Peace.  And it was truly worth the effort.

Stay tuned for Part 2 – if you finished this post- and I’ll reflect on what it’s all about.  

Digital Dreams

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Am I the only one who is dreaming in both physical and digital formats?

I am no dream expert. But I do get a sense, intuitively, that we can learn about ourselves from our dreams.

As a lifelong learner and educator, I have had many dreams in which I am still a student enrolled in class. I dream I forgot to do my homework. I guess, that is not hard to believe since I have spent most of my life in the classroom- both as teacher and learner. (I earned my master’s degree in 2007 and my PhD in 2012.) Or, as an educator, I dream that I forgot my lesson plans or that the students are completely unruly. Or- even that quintessential dream of showing up without your clothes (in the classroom, of course)!

In the past couple of years, I have had dreams in digital formats. I am online, at the computer, in a virtual space, or juggling screens.

Recently, I had a vivid dream in which many of my colleagues were present. We were attending some sort of staff development and had been asked to come prepared with a Powerpoint slide show or something. You know how you can’t really describe what happens in a dream in words. Whatever it was that I was suppose to bring….well, I was not prepared.

My supervisor said, “Wow! What is this! You always are on top of this!! Did you not get the email?”

Here is the vivid part of the dream, which was in color and was powerfully emotional. Tears filled up my eyes (and I don’t easily cry at sappy movies or anything). I had this sense of -enough is enough! I had this sense of admitting to everyone present something that I had been holding in for a long, long time.

With tearful eyes, I blurted out, “I am drowning in emails!”

It was a moment of complete surrender. I felt more a sense of relief and release than defeat. I had reached the limit and could not take one more step.

Thanks for reading this, dear reader. I just had to tell someone.