Let’s get bored

August 21, 2018August 21, 2018 / Christine Pennylegion / 4 Comments

Manoush Zomorodi hosts WYNC’s Note to Self podcast. In 2015, Zomorodi hosted a six-day challenge for her listeners in realigning their relationship with their smartphones. Why, she wondered, are our phones so hard to put down? How much do we actually use them, compared to how much we think we use them? And what are we missing out on? The challene series was widely successful, with over 20,000 initial participants, and now it’s a book:

This is a brilliant (ba-dum tssh) read in which Zomorodi makes a strong case for the value of boredom, of deliberately leaving (or making) spaces in our days for daydreaming, spacing out, and sitting around with no distractions or mental agenda. Far from wasted time, these moments are actually critical for our own creativity, ability to plan, and mental health. We shouldn’t be avoiding boredom; we should be embracing it.

But why is it so hard to let ourselves be bored? After hitting a creative wall at work, Zomorodi began examinging her life in order to figure out what was happening:

My mind felt tired. Worn-out. Why? Yes, I was juggling motherhood, marriage, and career in one of the most hectic cities in the world. But it was more than that. In order to analyze what was going on with me, I began by observing my own behaviour. What I found was, frankly, exhausting. As soon as I took a moment to reflect, I realized there wasn’t a single waking moment in my life that I didn’t find a way to fill — and my main accomplice was my phone.

I had long ago traded my own flip phone for a smartphone, and now it seemed I spent every spare minute on it. Whether waiting for the subway, in line for coffee, or at my son’s preschool for pickup, I was engaged in some kind of information call-and-response. I checked the weather, updated Twitter, responded to e-mails. When I flopped into bed at the end of an exhausting day, instead of turning out the lights, I chose to fire up Two Dots — a game that I couldn’t stop playing despite myself. I wasn’t using my smartphone to connect. I was using it to escape. […] My brain was always occupied, but my mind wasn’t doing anything with all the information coming in.

[…] I saw a connection between a lack of stimulation — boredom — and a flourishing of creativity and drive. It was so clear to me because the cycle of technological innovation sped up at exactly the same time my life did, too. Between the time my son was born and could walk, we saw mobile technology change the way people called a taxi, ordered food, found a date. Suddenly, very basic society actions that had remained unchanged for decades were upended. And then, when the next operating system came out six months later, unpended again. My life wasn’t just pre-children and post-children . . . it was simultaneously pre-mobile phone, post-mobile phone. Both children and smartphones shifted me to the core.

In light of all this, I asked myself, “Can my lack of ideas have to do with never being bored?” (3-4)

As it turns out, research suggests that the answer to that question is an overwhelming Yes. When we allow our minds to wander, we activate something called the default mode, “the mental place where we solve problems and generate our best ideas, and engage in what’s known as ‘autobiographical planning,’ which is how we make sense of our world and our lives and set future goals. The default mode is als involved in how we try to understand and empathize with other people, and make moral judgments” (5). When we’re spacing out, there’s an awful lot going on underneath the surface; it’s not wasted time, but rather the opposite. In fact, fMRIs show that when a person is daydreaming, their brains are active at about 80-90% of the level they would be when deliberately thinking through a complex problem. Under the surface, our brains are working hard — which is why our best ideas so often come when we’re taking a walk, washing dishes, or having a shower.

Zomorodi is not anti-technology and this is not an anti-technology book. It’s not about not using our smartphones, but about using them purposefully instead of mindlessly, about placing them back in service to us as tools rather than over us as taskmasters. To that end, she suggests seven exercises to be completed over the course of a week.. Here are the seven culminating challenges and some “upgrades” for those who want a bit more (she suggests reading Bored and Brilliant straight through before attempting them, in order to better understand the purpose of each challenge):

Observe yourself: download a time-and-usage tracking app to your phone (I’ve linked to those at the end of this post). Don’t change your behaviour on day one, but think about how you would like to use / relate to your phone.
Put your phone totally away while engaging in motion (no using it on your commute or while you’re out walking). Challenge upgrade: try instead to notice five things around you that you’ve never noticed before.
Have a photo-free day: don’t take any pictures with your phone. Challenge upgrade: today when you look at pictures on social media, only look at them: no likes, no comments, no shares or retweets.
Delete that app: the one that you find yourself constantly opening without even thinking about it, be it social media, a game, the news, whatever. Challenge upgrade: don’t just delete the app, delete your whole account.
Take a fakecation: block out some time for yourself, set an auto-reply on your email, let your phone go to voicemail, and totally disconnect from tech for that time. Challenge upgrade: don’t just take a hiatus from email and the phone, but download an app that will send auto-replies to incoming texts as well.
Observe something else: go to a public place (the mall, the library, a cafe, etc.) and simply sit and observe. Try to find something you would never have seen/noticed if your face was stuck in a screen. Challenge upgrade: Instead of just noticing, write down what you are observing, in as much detail as possible.
The Bored and Brilliant challenge: Identify an area of life where you need to do some real thinking. Set aside thirty minutes. Put a pot of water on the stove and watch it until it boils, then immediately sit down with a pen and paper and put your mind to the problem you’ve identified: unlock its solution through the deliberate cultivation of the boredom that leads to creative thinking.

I have not completed the challenges yet — most of the time I think I have a pretty good handle on how I’m using my phone. But one thing that really challenged me was in Chapter Five, “App Addled”: the phenomenon of self-interruption. We’re all aware of how easy it is to be interrupted by others: by incoming emails, by app notifications, by incoming text messages. But most of the time, it’s not other people who are interrupting us — it’s us interrupting ourselves:

But you can’t blame your coworkers or your children or your Gchat buddy for everything. Guess who is the person who actually interrupts you the most? Yourself. [Gloria] Mark’s lab has a term for this — the “pattern of self-interruption.”

“From an observer’s perspective, you’re watching a person [and] they’re typing in a Word document. And then, for no apparent reason, they suddenly stop what they’re doing and they shift and look at e-mail or check Facebook. These kinds of self-interruptions happen almost as frequently as people are interrupted from external sources,” Mark said. “So we find that when external interruptions are pretty high in any particular hour, then even if the level of external interruptions wanes [in the next hour], then people self-interrupt.”

In other words, if you’ve had a hectic morning dealing with lots of e-mail and people stopping by your desk, you are more likely to start interrupting yourself. Interruptions are self-perpetuating. (90)

I do this all the time. I’ll be writing a post, or writing an email, then all of a sudden I’m looking at my blog reader or checking my virtual store in my favourite game, or taking a look at my library holds list, or looking something up on wikipedia… and generally for no real reason. This self-interrupting also plays into something Zomorodi discusses in an earlier chapter: reading comprehension:

His journalistic interest piqued, Mike [Rosenwald] began investigating why he and his friends were struggling with something that, until recently, had come naturally. He went, of course, straight to the Internet to see what was coming between him and the page. (When in Rome . . . ) What he discovered was a radical break in reading methodology post-Internet. Before the Web, reading was primarily a linear activity. “You looked at a magazine, a menu, a book. Whatever,” he said. “You pretty much read it uninterrupted, and that’s the way we’ve read since writing on caves.”

Then along came the Internet with hyperlines, scrolling screens, and an impossible-to-finish flow of information, which necessitated nonlinear reading. The problem, Mike found, wasn’t that our brains have adapted to this second form of reading. Rather, it has supplanted the first. In an article he wrote for The Washington Post, he did his own in-house (and meta) experiment on the thoroughness of reading online. Only 30 percent of the people reading his story about having trouble reading got to the last line of his story. (46)

For a few years now, I’ve tried to make it a discipline to read as linearly as I can when I’m reading online, something that’s hard to do — all those delicious hyperlinks begging to be read as well! What I try to do is to open any links I want to read in new tabs, and to read them after I’ve finished with the thing I started with, rather than jumping around. It’s hard. But I think it’s worth trying. To that end I’ve decided that, going forward, instead of hyperlinking within the main body of my posts here, I’ll stick them all at the end. I’ve also started to go through old entries and reformat them this way (although that’s a side project that will take a little while to finish). I can’t control how people read my posts, of course, but I can maybe help foster some good habits — in myself as well.

I appreciate the thoroughness of the research in Bored and Brilliant (as well as its excellent index). Manoush Zomorodi has written a very timely and useful book, one which I recommend wholeheartedly to anyone who wants to take back some control over their digital experience and creative lives.

Meet Alia

July 24, 2018 / Christine Pennylegion

Lest this blog become all technological gloom and doom all the time, let me quickly point out something very cool I heard about yesterday — a counterweight to my last post, if you will.

I’ve started listening to a podcast called Team Human, hosted by Douglas Rushkoff. My introductory episode — 93: Palak Shah: Who’s Going to Care? — immediately grabbed my attention because of its subject: domestic workers (nannies, elder care workers, housecleaners, home healthcare providers, etc). This is a field I know relatively well. I worked as a nanny for several years. My mother cleaned houses for a time when I was a teenager. One of my sisters-in-law does some work in the home assistance field. So I know a little bit about domestic work from my own experience, and when I was a nanny I often ran into other nannies and sitters (and occasional housecleaners) during the course of my days.

In her interview segment, Palak Shah, the social innovations director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), called domestic work the “invisible backbone” of society — and if you think about it, that makes sense. If you have children and want to go to work, you need someone to care for those children. If you have elderly parents you can’t care for, somebody else needs to fill that role. In many respects, domestic workers are the ones who let the “regular” workforce get to work. But it is a largely invisible field because the work happens in the privacy of other people’s homes. And although domestic work is everywhere, it’s not a particularly respected field, and certainly not a well-paid one. When I was a nanny I was very fortunate in that most of my families treated me fairly, and my main clients (hi, Bruce and Steph!) registered as a business so that I would also be getting/making contributions to the Canada Pension Plan, Employment Insurance, etc. But many (probably most) domestic workers, especially in America, lack the worker protections and benefits (pensions, health plans, paid sick days, contracts, etc.) that the non-domestic workforce often takes for granted.

But domestic work does have something big going for it, which is that it is what we might call “future proof” — which is to say, domestic work is not something that can be automated or outsourced. We’re a long way from robots that can clean a bathroom. You’re not going to skype in a nanny from India to watch your children while you work. Domestic work is going to be around for a long time, and so the question is — how can we as a society make it better? If it’s important work — and it is important work! — what can happen to make working in people’s homes more tenable, sustainable, dignified, etc. for those who do it?

These are the sorts of questions that Palak Shah and others like her are asking. And one of the potential answers is a cool little app called Alia, coming out of the NDWA’s Fair Care Labs, which functions as a “portable benefits plan”, currently being beta tested for housecleaners. The idea is that a housecleaner will sign up and get her clients to do so as well. Each client pays a premium into Alia of $5 or $10 per cleaning. That money accrues in the cleaner’s account and can be used to provide paid time off or go toward insurance costs. Because the benefits are tied to the worker rather than to the job, she doesn’t have to worry about losing them with a change in employment. I think it’s a very cool concept; here’s a nice write-up in Wired Magazine. (And if you clean houses or use a housecleaner, consider signing up for beta testing.)

There: technology being used for something useful and pro-humanity. See? It’s not all bad. Some of it is very good indeed, which I need to remind myself whenever I have one of my regular Luddite fits.

Weekend Reading: tech and our children, social justice and the Holy Spirit, and caring for cast iron

July 14, 2018July 15, 2018 / Christine Pennylegion

Weekend Reading is a weekly collation of 3-5 articles that have caught my attention, published on Saturday mornings. Previous editions can be found here.

1. The Tech Industry’s Psychological War on Kids (medium.com)

What none of these parents understand is that their children’s and teens’ destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually unrecognized merger between the tech industry and psychology. This alliance pairs the consumer tech industry’s immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with drug-like power to seduce young users.

These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit. What these parents and most of the world have yet to grasp is that psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.

This piece is absolutely worth a read, especially for parents, although it’s something that should concern all of us.

2. Powers and Principalities: King and the Holy Spirit (plough.com)

Yet in some ways BLM is an example of George Santayana’s axiom that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. For the most part, BLM activists – like the post-1965 SNCC activists, the Black Panther Party, and assorted other radical black groups before them – exhibit little interest in, or comprehension of, the larger lessons of history. This is because they lack the deep spiritual and moral insight that must be the grounding for any sustainable movement. Having rejected the God of their fathers, they have also rejected the fatherhood of God.

This philosophical rejection is an act of spiritual and cultural suicide. Failure to discern the demonic character of white supremacy limits these activists’ ability to understand the fight they are engaged in, and hinders their efforts to develop long-term strategies. They can only describe the sadistic violence they witness and never fully understand or conquer it, so long as they ignore its spiritual source.

More importantly, they fail to use the only means of combatting the demonic: intercessory prayer. Instead, they are easily sucked into the spirit of the demonic themselves as they resort to violence, anger, and hate – a failing less common in the BLM movement than in Antifa, though the danger applies to both.

This piece from Eugene F. Rivers III is a powerful reminder of the spiritual realities that under-gird social conflict, and the only means by which they can truly be dealt with.

3. The Truth about Cast Iron (seriouseats.com)

There are a lot of myths about how to properly treat your cast iron pan, but thankfully, Kenji is here to set us on the right track. It turns out that using cast iron is easier than we all thought, and I’ve really enjoyed upping my cooking game with mine.

Jaron Lanier’s ten reasons

July 2, 2018July 2, 2018 / Christine Pennylegion / 4 Comments

Yes, I’m still thinking about this — although (believe it or not) reading this book came after I had made the decisions detailed here and here about the role of social media in my life. It has absolutely reinforced my convictions that I need to get off social media, though, and I’m glad that I have read it because Jaron Lanier is both better informed and much more eloquent than I am.

But first, who is Jaron Lanier, and why should we listen to what he has to say? Lanier is not a Luddite by any means, nor is he just some anti-technology crank. On the contrary; Lanier has been a programmer and computer scientist since the 1980s, and is intimately acquainted with Silicon Valley’s companies, workers, and products. He founded the first company that sold virtual reality products. He currently works for Microsoft. In short, he knows what he’s talking about — and what he’s talking about is alarming. (This profile of Lanier at The Guardian is nearly twenty years out of date now, but still a fascinating read. Alternatively, here is the bio page on his personal website.)

So, social media. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now is a book designed to ring all of our alarm bells. Lanier dives into how social media works (what is that mysterious thing called “the algorithm” and what is it doing?) and how it affects our lives. Here are his ten reasons for deleting:

You are losing your free will.
Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.
Social media is making you into an a**hole. [I censored that one for you, Grandma]
Social media is undermining truth.
Social media is making what you say meaningless.
Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.
Social media is making you unhappy.
Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity.
Social media is making politics impossible.
Social media hates your soul.

I won’t get into each of these arguments — you should just read the book, as it’s on the short side and very digestible — but here are some things I found particularly intriguing.

Argument one: you are losing your free will. Why is that? Because social media is deliberately designed to be addictive, and because addiction is the opposite of free will. I know that I’ve struggled with the impulse to constantly check my social media accounts, or to log on just to check one thing and only resurface an hour later. What I didn’t know is that a surprising number of Silicon Valley bigwigs have backgrounds in behaviourism, and that those backgrounds come into play in the way that social media is constructed. Underneath the surface, it’s not about connecting people or sharing our lives — fundamentally, the purpose of most of what we see on social media is to keep us engaged, to keep us returning to the site in question.

How does this work? Through both positive and negative feedback (and the way our brains react to both of those by trying to find the underlying pattern), through social pressure, and through the amplification of emotions to keep us engaged. But the easiest emotions to amplify are the negative ones: sadness, fear, anger. As we use social media, the adaptive algorithms that power it notice what keeps us engaged and feed us more of those things — and nearly always, those are the things that make us upset. We keep coming back because our buttons keep getting pushed. We lose our inability to stay off of social media for meaningful amounts of time. Our free will is being eroded.

Arguments three and six: social media is making you into an a**hole and destroying your capacity for empathy. These ones go hand in hand, really. And we don’t need Jaron Lanier to tell us that people can be horrible in the relatively anonymous space the internet provides — just open up the comments section of any online newspaper article and observe the vitriol flying. Flaming, trolling, malicious doxxing — we’ve seen it all. But the question is: why? Are we really so collectively uncivil? Or is there something about the platforms we’re using that brings out the worst in human nature?

Lanier posits that instead of the world being divided into trolls and victims, we each have an inner troll — but what causes that troll to come out? His theory, which I think is interesting, is that people have two switches inside them, as it were: solitary mode and pack mode. Something happens to us when we get switched to “pack”:

The pattern is found whenever people form into groups. […] The Pack setting of the switch makes you pay so much attention to your peers and enemies in the world of packs that you can become blind to what’s happening right in front of your face.

When the Solitary/Pack switch is set to Pack, we become obsessed with and controlled by a pecking order. We pounce on those below us, lest we be demoted, and we do our best to flatter and snipe at those above us at the same time. Our peers flicker between “ally” and “enemy” so quickly that we cease to perceive them as individuals. They become archetypes from a comic book. The only constant basis of friendship is shared antagonism toward other packs. (46)

[…]

When people act as solitary wolves, then each person is in a unique position in society and thinks in a unique way. Another example: Democratic elections are a genuine commingling of ideas, and have historically helped societies find paths forward despite controversy, but only so long as people are switched to Solitary. Democracy fails when the switch is set to Pack. Tribal voting, personality cults, and authoritarianism are the politics of the Pack setting.

It might sound like a contradiction at first, but it isn’t; collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals. (48)

The tribalism encouraged by the internet platforms we engage with is one piece of the puzzle — when we’re obsessed (and kept obsessed by the algorithms that control what we see online) with who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s in and who’s out, we are left with a tremendous need to prove ourselves to be in the “right” camps, no matter how much ugly talk is needed to keep us there.

But why are we so easily divided into camps and switched on to Pack mode? Again, part of the answer is in the way that social media algorithms function. One of the big features of most social media is that everyone has a customized feed, one that is trying to constantly give us the particular things that will keep us engaged on the platform. But that means that nobody is seeing what anyone else is seeing, and we don’t what the differences are between what we are all (not) seeing:

A thought experiment can help expose how weird out situation has become. Can you imagine if Wikipedia showed different versions of entries to each person on the basis of a secret data profile of that person? Pro-Trump visitors would see an article completely different from the one shown to anti-Trump people, but there would be no accounting of all that was different or why.

This might sound dystopian or bizarre, but it’s similar to what you see in your … feed. Content is chosen and ads are customized to you, and you don’t know how much has been changed for you, or why. (75)

The result of this: our own worldviews are distorted (as we are fed more and more of the things that reinforce it, and less and less of what will challenge it), and we are less aware of other people’s worldviews. It becomes harder to understand those in opposite “camps” from us (whatever those camps may be) because what they are seeing and what we are seeing are getting farther and farther removed from each other. We are losing out on common experience; our capacity to imagine the world from others’ points of view is crippled. We are constantly switched into Pack mode because we seem crazy to each other; we seem crazy to each other because our feeds are robbing us of our ability to see the world from a perspective other than our own. It’s a vicious cycle, and what makes it worse is that “The degree of difference between what is shown to someone else and what I can guess is being shown is itself unknowable. The opacity of our times is even worse than it might be because the degree of opacity is itself opaque” (80).

So what do we do, now? Is social media an inveterate evil from which we should forever abstain? Lanier proposes that we should abstain — not forever, but for now:

Some have compared social media to the tobacco industry, but I will not. The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead, after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard. Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available. (27)

I don’t know when nontoxic varieties will be available. I do know that Lanier has convinced me that opting out of most or all of my social media is a healthy choice in the mean time.

Becoming Tech-Wise, Part 1: Setting the Stage

November 14, 2017February 13, 2018 / Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

I am currently reading through The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place by Andy Crouch. It’s a challenging read, but a timely one; while I appreciate the ease and utility that things like smartphones have brought to my life, I also resent technology’s hold over me. (This resentment stems in no small measure from my perpetual disappointment with my own lack of self-discipline in these matters, as well as the fact that much of our technology seems designed to create dependency in us.) The questions that Crouch asks about the role of technology in our family life — about how we use it, and how we allow or don’t allow it to form us and our relationships with each other — are penetrating, and have given me much food for thought. It’s a small book, but one that I am reading slowly — and will be blogging about each section as I finish it, in part to help me digest his ideas and refine my own.

The book is divided into three main sections: “The Three Key Decisions of a Tech-Wise Family”, “Daily Life”, and “What Matters Most”. Those will be addressed in my next three posts on the book; for today, I’m just tackling Crouch’s preface and introduction, which set the stage for what’s to come. They are capped by what he calls the “Ten Tech-Wise Commitments” (each of which is addressed in a subsection of one of the three larger divisions named above).

So, let’s begin.

In the preface, Crouch talks about his stated aim of putting technology “in its proper place.” This doesn’t meant that technology is bad and should have no place in our homes; rather, that its pervasive default presence demands that we set limits in place around its use. He notes that this will not look the same for every family, and that even in one family it will look different during different seasons of life (as it may make sense to completely prohibit television for a two-year-old, but not for a twelve-year-old, for example). He doesn’t provide a hard-and-fast list of what technology we should have, or how to use it (which would be fast out of date, anyway), but rather offers a series of guiding principles to help us discern how we want to interact with our tech:

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us to bond with the real people we have been given to love. It’s out of its proper place when we end up bonding with people at a distance, like celebrities, whom we will never meet.

Technology is in its proper place when it starts great conversations. It’s out of its proper place when it prevents us from talking with and listening to one another.

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us take care of the fragile bodies we inhabit. It’s out of its proper place when it promises to help us escape the limits and vulnerabilities of those bodies altogether.

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us acquire skill and mastery of domains that are the glory of human culture (sports, music, the arts, cooking, writing, accounting; the list could go on and on). When we let technology replace the development of skill with passive consumption, something has gone wrong.

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us cultivate awe for the created world we are part of and responsible for stewarding… It’s out of its proper place when it keeps us from engaging the wild and wonderful natural world with all our senses.

Technology is in its proper place only when we use it with intention and care. … [I]t doesn’t stay in its proper place on its own; … If we aren’t intentional and careful, we’ll end up with a quite extraordinary mess. (20-1)

So far so reasonable. But how do we set those limits? In his introduction, Crouch begins by laying out some statistics about technology use — not just who is using what, but how it makes us feel. The vast majority (78%) of American parents, we are told, think that raising kids today is more complicated than it was when they were children. The number one reason given for that perception is “technology and social media” (65%). I believe it. The recent technological revolution/explosion/whatever means that we’re in fairly uncharted waters when it comes to managing our children’s encounters with technology. It’s hard to know how much to intervene, or how to do it if we have determined to begin. But Crouch gives us two helpful tools here.

The first is the “nudge” (here he is drawing from Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness). A nudge is a small way that we make certain choices easier or more likely. A nudge helps guide us toward the choice we want to make (at least, that we want to make when we are at our best) by either making the good choice easier or the bad choice less convenient, which helps us preserve our “precious limited supply of willpower, leaving it available for the moments when we really need it” (33). In terms of technology use, a nudge might be something like disabling facebook notifications, so that you’re more likely to check your newsfeed because you’ve made a conscious choice to do so, rather than because you were summoned by the imperious ding. A nudge toward healthier eating might be putting the apples at the front of your fridge and the chocolate way back behind the pickles somewhere. You get the picture. Having the apples at the front of the fridge won’t stop you from eating the chocolate if you really want it, but the minor inconvenience of digging it out — and the relative ease of grabbing an apple — makes it more likely that you will choose the apple. That’s a nudge.

The other tool addresses what nudging can’t: the development of our moral character. Crouch writes that

… nudges will never, on their own, build the wisdom and courage we need — partly because we often can’t control our environment, no matter how much we’d like to. We need to change something inside of us as well: to develop the strength to make good choices even when everything around us is nudging, or pushing, us in the wrong direction. And for that we need disciplines. (35)

The disciplines, Crouch writes, gradually strengthen us, move our limits further out, “move us toward being the kinds of people we were meant to be and want to be” (37). And disciplines, take, well, discipline! They are “not about specific decisions but about patterns of life” (37) that will, by their nature, shape our choices. As the capstone to the introduction, Crouch offers us his list of “ten commitments” for starting and shaping the discussion around technology’s proper place in our families. Not all of them will apply to everyone; not everything that we need to consider is covered. But they are a good catalyst for further thought and discussion:

We develop wisdom and courage together as a family.
We want to create more than we consume. So we fill the center of our home with things that reward skill and active engagement.
We are designed for a rhythm of work and rest. So one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year, we turn off our devices and worship, feast, play, and rest together.
We wake up before our devices do, and they “go to bed” before we do.
We aim for “no screens before double digits” at school and at home.
We use screens for a purpose, and we use them together, rather than using them aimlessly and alone.
Car time is conversation time.
Spouses have one another’s passwords, and parents have total access to children’s devices.
We learn to sing together, rather than letting recorded and amplified music take over our lives and worship.
We show up in person for the big events of life. We learn how to be human by being fully present at our moments of greatest vulnerability. We hope to die in one another’s arms. (41-2)

Anecdotally, I have had success — so far — with implementing a simple nudge of my own. I removed the shortcut to the app that I waste the most time on from the home screen of my phone. I still have the app; I just have to page through all of my apps to get to it. But the simple change of no longer having it right there in front of me whenever I pick my phone up has meant that I have spent way, way less time using it than I was before. Do I still use it? Yes. But now I’m opening it up deliberately, not just because of habit or absent-minded default behaviour. Nudges work.

The disciplines, of course, will take more effort … but I look forward to seeing where Andy Crouch takes us in the discussion of how to develop them in the context of our current (over-) reliance on technology. The next post in this series will tackle Crouch’s section entitled “The Three Key Decisions of a Tech-Wise Family,” which looks at items 1-3 above. Stay tuned!

[Other posts in this series: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5]

Smartphones and the iGen

August 5, 2017February 12, 2018 / Christine Pennylegion

First, read this recent article from The Atlantic (it’s long; I’ll wait):

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

My facebook friends know that smartphone use is one of my own personal bugaboos — even though I will fully admit to owning and using one myself, no real plans to stop doing so. My phone holds all of my digital life in one place: calendar, email, phone and text conversations, games, and more. I have a daily reminder set to take my medication at 8 pm. I use the dropbox app when I’m cooking (so that I have access to my recipes no matter where I am). My phone plays me music and podcasts when I want to listen to something. And of course, my phone is my camera: I take hundreds of pictures (yes, 90% of them are of my kids) and they automatically sync to cloud storage for me. I shop on my phone. I check the weather on my phone. Sometimes I watch TV on my phone. If I’m curious about something, I can find my answer on google or wikipedia in seconds. In many respects it is the most useful single device I own.

There is a part of me that hates this.

In some ways, my phone is too useful. It’s great to be able to keep in touch with people, but it’s too easy to mindlessly pick it up to check facebook, even though nothing is likely to have changed in the last twenty minutes. It’s too easy to pick up my phone instead of a book, or a notepad and pen. Why is it so hard to head to the bathroom without my phone in hand? Why is it so hard to not have it be the first thing I look at every morning?

The above-linked article from The Atlantic examines the effects of smart phones and social media on what the author dubs the “iGen” — those born roughly between 1995 and 2012. The iGen doesn’t remember a time before the internet. I do; I’m a Millennial, and among the oldest of that cohort. I remember when we first got internet at home, and my first email address (at hotmail, of course) — circa 1997 or 1998. Those were the days before search engines; if we wanted to find something online, we just blindly typed in URLs until we got what we wanted, or at least something equally amusing. My husband belongs to the micro-generation between Gen-X and Millennials often called the “Oregon Trail generation,” and he straddles the line between analog and digital even more than I do. Our children are too young to qualify for iGen, but their lives will surely be shaped by technology in ways I can’t even imagine right now, just as my life has been shaped by computers and the internet into something looking very different than my parents’ lives at a similar age. At two, Anselm is frighteningly adept at navigating our phones and old tablet.

There’s no doubt that this sort of technology has impacted our lives in many positive ways. But articles like this one are a good reminder that we mustn’t forget to count the cost. We have gained a lot; what have we given up?

One sobering effect of the ubiquity of smartphones in the hands of children and teenagers is the measurable effects on mental health. Smartphone use is correlated with sharply increasing levels of isolation, depression, and an increase in suicide among both boys and girls. Social media connects us to others in the virtual world, but can disconnect us from those around us in the analog world — think of how hard it can be to get someone’s attention away from their phone, even when we are standing in front of them. Cyber-bullying is a problem, especially for girls, who are more prone than boys to use social media to bully via their preferred brand of aggression: ostracization and exclusion.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed this in my own life. I feel unhappier on days when I have been more focused on my screens. When I over-consume (almost always on my phone, though sometimes my laptop plays its own part), I feel restless, edgy, and sad. I get snappy. It’s not healthy; I know it’s not healthy; but it’s awfully hard to break out of this pattern, even for someone old enough to well remember a different way of life. Heck, I didn’t even get a smartphone until about a year and a half ago. Growing up with phones and tablets at their fingertips, what chances do our children have?

We know what phrases to trot out at this juncture. Be the change you want to see in the world. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Et cetera. I may not be ready to stop using my smartphone; realistically, that day will probably never come (at least not until I’m refusing to upgrade to direct brain implant in twenty years or so). But the next time I have to pee, my phone isn’t coming with me.

~~~~~

For further reading:

I kicked my smartphone addiction by retraining my brain to enjoy being bored

Boys Online: Teens from across Canada on everything from nude pics to twitter breakups

I Used to be a Human Being

Screens in Schools are a $60 Billion Hoax

Don’t Post about Me on Social Media, Children Say