Clippings

Posts for Tag: Unplug

Documenting Ourselves vs Reflection

Sherry Turkle carried the Alone Together theme to a New York Times op-ed this morning. She wrote
Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does thing to us, changing not just what we do but who we are. The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us “on pause” in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations “on pause” when we send or receive a text, an image, an email, a call. When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.
and finished with this reflection
It is not too late to reclaim our composure. I see the most hope in young people who have grown up with this technology and begin to see its cost. They respond when adults provide them with sacred spaces (the kitchen, the family room, the car) as device-free zones to reclaim conversation and self-reflection.

Unplug

James Buckhouse at Medium

Something marvelous happens when you treat your phone as punctuation, rather than a metronome. Hugs burst forth from across the bar instead of smirks from friends to whom before you might have merely shown a funny gif. Laughs and forgotten screenplays emerge as intricate theories or urgent product visions. Musical re-mappings and rhyming games mix with foreign languages, fun, trust, hope and debate. In other words—conversation. Crass, elegant, classy, funny, dirty, dire yet brilliant conversation.

Eden Walk

There are two expeditions capturing my imagination right now—Ben Saunders and Tarka L’Herpiniere's quest to retrace Scott's journey to the South Pole and Paul Salopek's seven-year walk around the globe. In The New York Times, Salopek reflects on "bipedal journalism" and the lessons of his journey.

AND then there is simply the act of traveling through the world at three miles per hour — the speed at which we were biologically designed to move. There is something mesmerizing about this pace that I still can’t adequately describe.

Later in the day, I saw there messages in Salopek's Twitter stream—


Related

There's a remarkable similarity of feeling in Edward Huth's discovery after making the effort to learn to navigate with environmental clues—After a year of this endeavor, something dawned on me: the way I viewed the world had palpably changed. The sun looked different, as did the stars. While the ocean didn’t accommodate my “human” need for meaning, a different sense emerged from the wave patterns that conveyed the presence of winds, shoals, coastlines and distant storms.