Saturday, September 23, 2017

I Have My Phone, Therefore I Am


Cell phones and creativity don't always mix.
This past week, we held a poetry and music festival at the alternative high school where I work.  Students created poems throughout the week, practiced songs they wanted to perform, and created accompanying art work for their words. Some of them were able to create poems of depth and meaning fairly easily, while others couldn't maintain the concentration necessary to write anything. I empathized with both types of writers. I used to write a lot of poetry throughout my late twenties and early thirties, but it dwindled down to almost nothing while I was in the thick of raising my kids and struggling to meet all my obligations as a wife and mother of young children. I couldn't find the time to reach that state of openness and quiet is that is necessary to take words and piece them together into something beautiful. For some reason, these students of mine cannot find that space either. 

My lack of quiet space came from obligations to work and family--a fairly typical occurrence for someone my age and my place in life.  My students' lack of space, however, can be attributed to the nature of today's technology-centered world.  As teenagers, time should be one of their greatest assets, with enough of it to actually have blocks of it filled with nothing to do.  Nevertheless, this is not the case. Every minute for them is filled, not only with typical adolescent thoughts, daydreams, and doubts, but with media, Youtube, music, and video games.  Their lives are ones of non-stop sensory input which leaves very little room for creative output. A person doesn't need to exercise her imagination if someone else does it for her at the push of a button or the stroke of a keyboard.  There is no room anymore for boredom and that develops into a distinct lack of ability to deal with the feelings that boredom manifests.  I think there is a correlation between this and the high levels of anxiety I see in my students.  They get used to constant entertainment, their entire lives having been an exercise in "bread and circuses" and don't know what to do with themselves when the immediate mental gratification stops.

Sometimes I think that technology and this culture of instant gratification is not only changing how we do things, but it's changing brain development as well.  Who we are now as a people will definitely not match who we become in the future. Technology has not only become a daily tool for humanity, but an extension of oneself.  For young people it's almost as if Decartes' definition of self has become "I have my phone, therefore I am."  It worries me in regard to purely human-inspired artistic creativity.  What's going to happen with traditional artistic endeavors? Are young people not going to be confident enough in their skills to make things without the help or inspiration of technology because they've never had to rely on just their own thoughts and ideas?  It worries me because technology is so pervasive that it's not only changing young people, but everyone else as well.

I see changes in the way I think and the way in which I do things, and I attribute that to the constant presence of technology in my life as well.  I have a shorter attention span and an increased need for consistent mental stimulation of some kind.  And if technology has affected me this way, someone who has already been set and programmed a long time ago, what is it doing to young people who still have malleable minds? All people, including me, need to make time for more unplugged downtime. We need time to be bored. We need to sit with that boredom long enough to want to create something or do something productive that alleviates it.  Having nothing to do or to think about has a way of opening one's mind to deeper thoughts, concentration, and creation of wonderful things.

I am definitely going to work on giving myself more opportunities for having time to do nothing.  I need it to get back to more of who I used to be.  And, if I am lucky, maybe in that nothing I will create something and it will be beautiful. 

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