The Case for Space

I recently stumbled upon Bored and Brilliant, a project of New Tech City.  New Tech City is a podcast about technology and how it changes our lives.  The Bored and Brilliant project is about getting people to rethink their relationship with technology.  It will include a week of challenges, such as delete one app from your smartphone, starting on February 2nd.  According to New Tech City, the average mobile consumer spends 2 hours and 57 minutes a day on his or her phone.  Yikes!  The project encourages people to use the apps Moment or BreakFree to track how many times a day they pick up their phones and how much time they spend on them.  They do acknowledge the irony of using an app to track technology usage.

I like my smartphone, but I'll admit that it can be a distraction.

I downloaded Moment onto my iPhone, just to see what it's all about.  It's too bad that you can't use it without also giving access to your location.  Although I'm sure I'm already using a number of other apps that track my location as well.  Hello, Big Brother.  I can see that Moment or BreakFree could be useful to someone who wants to curb usage of their smartphone.  It's the same concept as a food diary for those who want to lose weight.  When my clothes start getting tight, I use MyFitnessPal as a food diary.  Hey, it works for me.  For example - by tracking my food intake on the app, I realize that a serving of chips means eleven chips and not the whole bag!  I need some help with portion sizes.   

It was interesting to see how Moment works, but my iPhone is not the bulk of my personal technology use.  If I want to be more mindful of time spent on technology, I need to consider time spent on the computer and the iPad also.  I research and write using both of those - but I also waste a good deal of time checking e-mail and Facebook and (yes, I admit) getting sucked into reading articles about over-the-top celebrity plastic surgery botches and epic food fails.  Beyond the computer and mobile devices, technology time for me also includes some television viewing.  I haven't met a British period/costume drama that I haven't wanted to watch yet.  And also, sometimes - American Idol.  I know, my tastes are widely varied. 

Last year, I participated in Screen-Free Week.  I even wrote a blog post about that experience.  The year's event is May 4-10, 2015.  I think I'll participate again.  Maybe you'll join me?  I've also read about people taking a weekly technology sabbath, when they spend a whole day each week without using phones, computers, televisions or other devices.  Other people have put up boundaries around the times of day that they use certain technology or use social media.  Obviously, people feel the need to sometimes limit the presence of technology in their lives.  I know I do.  I am not anti-technology at all.  I appreciate the different ways that my family and I use technology in our lives.  And I do like my smartphone.  Remember Melancholy Mary?  Well, meet Minimalist Mary.  She sure does love a device that can perform multiple functions, because that means she has to own and keep track of fewer things.  Minimalist Mary is happy that her phone also takes photos.  That it can call, text, e-mail, and calculate.  It can take the place of a notebook, calendar, to-do list, alarm clock and much more.  The problem is that the smartphone (and tablet and computer) can also offer a lot of unnecessary options or distractions.  It has even been suggested that the level of technology present in our lives is affecting our attention spans or changing our brains.

In "Smartphones Don't Make Us Dumb" - an opinion piece in The New York Times, Daniel T. Willingham contends that smartphones aren't making us dumb nor are they shrinking our attention spans.  However, smartphones may be making us less willing to pay attention.

Are we more easily bored because "the digital world carries the promise of amusement that is constant, immediate and limitless?"  

Or does our "...appetite for endless entertainment suggests that worthier activities will be shoved aside?" 

It's unclear.  And research hasn't proven either of those theories yet.  But if we are losing our ability to daydream, that would not be good.  Because research has definitely shown that daydreaming has many benefits, including "an association with greater creativity."

This makes sense to me.  Creative ideas or solutions often come to me in the quiet spaces of my life - a solitary walk in the park, in the shower, while falling asleep, standing in the kitchen mashing bananas for bread.  Sometimes I even have my aha! moments in the middle of the night.  Two times when I was writing very important family tributes - the speech for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary and the eulogy for my dad's funeral - the important ideas came together as I was thinking and falling asleep.  I had to get up and scratch out a few notes or sit down at the computer and type.

We need quiet space in our lives, time to daydream, time to be bored (as the Bored and Brilliant project frames it).  Sometimes we just sit and daydream.  Sometimes we perform a potentially contemplative task - hiking in the woods, listening to music, doodling, knitting, baking, etc. - where our minds have the freedom to ponder.  Our minds don't have the freedom to ponder if we're filling our empty spaces or waiting times with scrolling through Facebook or Twitter or playing games on our smartphone.  That becomes multitasking, which does not give us space to daydream or to observe what's happening around us.  Some research indicates that multitasking may not be a good thing at all.  According to this article on Forbes.com, researchers "found that people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information, or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time."   

There's definitely a case for "space" in our lives.  Are you mindful of the technology in your life?  Would you like to change your relationship with it?

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Coming up later this week...a somewhat related post about creativity.