Maggie Jackson » busyness

Are We Losing the Magic of Play in a Digital World?

maggie — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:12:37 +0000

We began by picturing a young Eleanor Roosevelt teaching immigrant children to dance in the very room where we were gathered. Long ago, a dashing young Franklin D. Roosevelt would come to escort her home. I could see in my mind’s eye his jaunty straw hat, the long twirling skirts, an awkward young woman brave enough to spend her evenings at University Settlement in lower Manhattan.

Nearly a century later, it was fitting that we began an evening’s conversation on the place of attention and imagination in a digital age with this feat of collective reverie. Our minds layered past over present – and the room seemed richer for the memory. Our capacity to move between the here and now and imagined worlds is central to our humanity.

But today are we driving children away from moments of reflection and imagination – and intimacy? Richard Lewis, a poet, organized the evening – the first of a series of three he is holding to examine this crucial question. The first evening in February attracted a dozen music and art teachers, artists, musicians and others. (The series continues March 12 and April 30.)

Play allows us to create a sense of internal space, began Lewis, founder of the Touchstone Center. In play, the young can make something out of the ordinary happen. The child starts the magic – a magic that can be shared. Lewis told of visiting a New York City classroom where he asked children what happens to the sun shining into a car? And could they recapture that sunshine? The children were intrigued. Suddenly, they were talking about “the human ability to imagine,” said Lewis.

We circled the room, offering stories of imagination and reflection in our early lives. A young woman told of the freedom that she felt when she danced. A man spoke of a special, secret rock in a city park. A friend of mine recalled ‘cooking’ with mud and grass as a child in the countryside. She’s now raising a city-bred daughter who didn’t play house with the earth as her toy. Yet she and her daughter now cook – for real – side by side, sharing moments of culinary togetherness. I talked about the magic of the woods where I played with my friends – the trees, ponds, paths and hide-outs that were practically characters in our playtime.

Then we began to gently explore what happens when children immerse themselves more and more in an entrancing digital world of another’s making. That evening as in the rest of our lives, there was a vague sense of worlds clashing. In celebrating the play of our own childhoods, we couldn’t help but worry about its increasing absence in children’s lives today, even as we celebrated the promise and achievement of the technological.

Long after the close of the evening, I mused about these questions, dallying with the differences, circling around these puzzles. And I see two causes for concern. True, digital living offers opportunities for the cultivation of imagination: videogames, tv and the ‘net offer entrancing, wildly visual fictions. Not since medieval times have we inhabited an era as richly visual as ours today. And that’s good.

Yet the screen is a hungry force in the world: children spend more than seven hours daily immersed in media, losing play-time, sleep, quiet and face-time. Lewis recalled watching a child on the subway, glued to a videogame, tuning out a parent who was insistently trying to engage him. If we drive children away from their innate needs to go within themselves to reflect and imagine, we’ll be losing something of our humanity. Are we looking up from our screens often enough – and teaching our children to do so?

As well, while digital escapades tap into the human imagination, immersing the player in entrancing worlds for hours on end, on-screen play too often demands that we fit into templates of another’s making. It provides alluring worlds, where we make choices. But these are not worlds of our own making.

We don’t yet fully understand what our technologies are doing to us, and how we in turn are shaping our machines. But we have to keep asking these questions – and looking up from our screens. I wrote this blog in fits and starts, reflecting over time. And one evening, I reread my notes from University Settlement house, as I hurtled through the night on a train.

In the café car, a mother and college-age daughter sat across from each other, mom in head phones glued to an ipad movie, daughter fiddling with her song lists while playing itunes out loud. Not a word was exchanged for hours. Nearby, a small boy played a video game as his dad toyed with his smart phone. When the father looked over and advised the boy on the game, the youngster hit him and screamed, ‘why’d you make me do that?’ Farther down the car, four women shared giggles and beers, and a couple played backgammon. Half of the people at the cafe tables were looking one another in the eye, sharing a laugh, talking. Half were not.

Where are we headed? What’s being lost and gained as we become entranced by these new forms of magic? And could a loss in time for play affect our ability to connect? I can’t help but think that a rich inner life sets the stage for deep human connection. Imagine that.

Does Quiet Un-Nerve Us? A Muse on Tinker Tailor Soldier…

maggie — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:48:10 +0000

First one, then another… at the showing of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that I attended last weekend, numerous people walked out of the movie. By the third or fourth exodus, I noticed that viewers were exiting in the film’s most still moments: when the camera lingers on retired spy George Smiley, pensively sitting alone in a pub or when he gives a long, tipsy monologue about his encounter with Russia’s top spymaster. The action had slowed, the hunt had paused – and some voted with their feet.

It’s intriguing that this complex remake of John Le Carre’s classic thriller seems to divide us. Critics, as far as I can see, are mostly laudatory – extolling the cinematography, superb acting, the complex story line. But we, the viewers, seem to love or hate the film; only two of 34 reader-reviewers on The New York Times.com give the movie a score of three out of five. Most rate the movie one/two or a four/five, detesting the film as “slow” and “sluggish” or praising it as “brilliant” and “engaging” - and the naysayers outnumber the fans.

Writes marsacademy: “This film may not find a huge audience, because it has a quality of watchful stillness at its core, which is very unlike what the public expects of a ‘spy film.’ It is not an ‘action’ movie.”

Well put. I think that’s precisely why people were walking out. It’s just a movie of course, and excitement is subjective; your terrifying Ferris Wheel ride could be my aerial nap. But it’s perhaps a mark of our times that people could line up so vehemently in opposite corners over action vs. stillness. Although many of us increasingly battle for calm, we’re still surrounded by – and strongly influenced by – a culture of the quick hit, push-button, the ever-rising tide of busy-ness. After all, adrenaline is as addictive as drugs, studies show.

We may be so shaped by the gadget as appendage, tv as white noise and chit-chat as interaction that it seems stifling to be confronted by stillness. If so, we will surely miss out on the second and third layers of life, or the mysteries that perhaps even our best spymasters may never solve. Hurry past quiet, and we cease to see, as Seamus Heaney once wrote, “allegory hard as a figured shield … polished until its undersurface surfaced, like peat smoke mulling through Byzantium.”

In life as in movies, we have to pause to see what’s beneath the polish.

With A Little Help From My Friends

maggie — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 12:35:02 +0000

When you’re an author, you have to be an extrovert and an introvert. Long lonely days of research, writing and thinking are interspersed (if you’re lucky) with speaking, interviews, travel and time spent plugging your book. These two challenges demand different kinds of energy.

So wearing my hyper-social marketing hat, I recently pushed a button on Linked-in that invited all 800 or so of my email contacts to connect with me. The ripple effects were fascinating.

Yes, I achieved one goal; in one weekend, my Linked In contacts grew from 69 to more than 400. My first sophomoric reaction was to gloat. I proudly told my teen-aged kids of my swelling circle of contacts. It was so easy! I just sat back and noticed the mass of emails in my inbox saying “Congratulations! You are now linked to…” The connections were made – and quickly forgotten. I stopped even reading the emails to see who I had connected to.

But then came the real social link-ups. The only personal, really social emails that I received came from friends and business contacts who did not do Linked In. They fell into two categories. There were those who asked for an explanation (‘What is this party that you’re inviting me to?’ Or, from a few seniors, ‘How do I do it?’) I found myself apologizing for the bother, and feeling a bit impatient as I walked some folks through the first steps of signing up.

Another group, sometimes poignantly, apologized for not doing social media, or for doing only Facebook, but not Linked In etc. Via the Net, they spoke to me – and I responded. We had an interchange – because they did not link up with me. I can remember these brief, often newsy conversations, while my new roster of 400 or 500 new links made no impression on me.

Of course, all these new weak ties may prove “useful” to me someday. I’ll get to update these contacts on my writerly doings, spread the news of my next book, and hear their stories in exchange. Yet I wonder whether all our frantic efforts to expand our networks are a kind of busyness that impedes the living of life. Are we searching for connection in the wrong places?

A quick glance at the research on social media is interesting.

- The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report on social media, warning of Facebook depression, where kids feel excluded from all the postured fun.

- A cross-cultural study finds that US college students have more weak ties and larger networks than South Korean students – who bond with smaller groups of strong ties.

- Most intriguingly, researchers seem to be pushing back on the idea that weak ties are the route to creativity; instead one study finds that “wide” sharing of content among strong ties inspires creative interactions. Perhaps backing up this finding, a British author points out that people have an average of 120 friend on Facebook, but actually exchange messages with about 7-10 of them!

The quality vs quantity debate comes back again and again – in terms of time spent with children, time spent with contacts on- and offline, levels of income… One thing’s for sure: we have to make choices in this brief life. I pushed a button, expecting an easy expansion of my social milieu. But our social lives on or off the Net should demand thought and care. We especially have to remember: how do others feel at the other end of the line?

We’re Busy. We’re Productive. But In What Sense of the Word?

maggie — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:03:52 +0000

We’re so busy, so “productive,” ticking off items off our agendas, clicking through over-stuffed in-boxes. But in what sense are we productive ? Could it be that we are racing ahead in the most shallow senses of the word?

This is a particularly timely question as we reap the fall-out from an era of unprecedented, and often unthinking abundance. By unthinking, I mean activity without thought to consequence, to ourselves and others. Activity without perspective, especially on the future. Isn’t that the core of what’s been happening in terms of the environment, crimes like Madoff’s, and even the disintegration of deep family rhythms and rituals?

A short but important column in the U.K.’s Guardian newpaper this past weekend drives to the heart of this question of the cult of busyness.

“Telling ourselves we’re hugely stressed makes us feel important, in demand, even energised; it also gives us permission to avoid confronting deeper issues,” writes Oliver Burkeman.

He writes, “… busyness is the perfect excuse: if you’re convinced that you’re overstretched and overwhelmed, you’re spared the terrifying prospect of actually doing the things, and making the changes, that you want – or say that you want, since busyness spares you from examining that question, too.”

Notice the word “terrifying.” Burkeman’s comments remind me of a man I met at a futurist conference who spoke glowingly of his new cell phone that worked globally. (This was a while back.) He told the audience, “Now, I never have to be alone.”

Yes, it’s often terrifying to be alone with oneself. And it’s terrifying to take responsibility for ourselves – and for the care and keeping of our world.

Addendum: A site called Sharp Brains and a blog called Neuronarrative both have posted email-interviews with me about Distracted. In both cases, the questions were intriguing.