Mindfully Digital

I found myself seriously lost at sea yesterday afternoon…lost on the Info Sea, that is…

It happens despite all my good intentions, skills, and strategies. I think I’m heading here and end up waaaaaaaaaaay over there. I was rescued by creatures highly skilled at navigating the seas—birds. Specifically, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s March Cornell Lab eNews that landed in my email box (you can subscribe here). This particular headline in the newsletter got my attention: Billions of Birds Migrate. Where Do They Go? Clicking the link took me here, to a collaboration between National Geographic and the Cornell Lab’s eBird project using citizen science data. [Read more…] about Lost in a sea of browser tabs? Cornell Lab of Ornithology to the rescue…

Photo by Jose Moreno

In her book Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle writes about the work of conversation. Think about it. We show up to talk with other people face-to-face (when we could be watching the next episode of You Name It or tunneling miles down in Instagram). We listen without judgments (or at least we try hard to suspend our usual lightning-fast judgments). We ask questions when we don’t understand and we make ourselves vulnerable. We risk sharing what we’re thinking, especially when our thoughts are still unformed and our feelings may be raw, confusing, or overwhelming. We struggle to articulate a question that plagues us. We discover what we’re passionate about or what’s worrying us as we hear ourselves thinking aloud. We sense what we’re too afraid to share. We become more skillful at offering our attention to another. We hear solutions that would never have occurred to us on our own. We discover the value of thinking with others as we arrive at a place we could only arrive at together. We learn to navigate disagreement and conflict with increasing grace and appreciation for another’s point of view. We grow more tolerant of the natural lulls and pauses in conversation, letting the silences be ok. [Read more…] about Now—a perfect time to begin your family tech conversation

Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
The Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

The New York Times ran a challenge in November, 2017 inviting teens to explore their relationships with news—they published the results February 1, 2018. If you’ve been reading my Friday Mindful Digital Life posts for a while, you know I have been exploring my own relationship to news. I’ve written about my personal experiment with a “News-Out” that I started in the summer when a Mindful Tech retreat I was scheduled to attend was cancelled. (If you missed those posts, you can catch up here, here, and here.) That self-organized experiment proved to be life-changing. Why? I think it was less about the experiment itself and more about the awareness I focused on my relationship with “news” combined with deep reflection on the choices I was making, and the habits I was enacting. [Read more…] about Launch a weekly technology talk sooner than later

The news in the last several weeks has been full of reports about former Facebook, Apple, and Google employees expressing concerns about the dangers of smart phones and social media—in particular, to children and young people—but in general, for everyone.

Here are just a few statements high profile technology executives and investors have made in recent months: [Read more…] about Designing technology for the deepest human values

I knew from the beginning where I wanted to take the photo for the home screen of this website—Moss Beach, California. I was thrilled when my friend and photographer Tanya Anguita said she was rehearsing on the weekend in Pacifica. “Pacifica? That’s right around the bend from Moss Beach. Let’s meet there!” I hadn’t thought it would be possible. Tanya is a mother of a 4-year-old daughter, a busy photographer, and she was performing in the holiday Dickens Faire. And then it came together with ease…crazy wind and a stretch of beach closed for resting Harbor seals, but we made it to Moss Beach.

Why Moss Beach? Once upon a time, when my daughter Zoe was three-years-old, it was time for us to find a new home. Her father and I headed north across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, but then, pulled by some invisible magnet, we found ourselves making a huge loop and driving south to end up in Moss Beach, 30 minutes south of San Francisco. Moss Beach is home to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, an intertidal zone teeming with life forms with exotic names and strange looks to match—Nudibranchs, Gumboot chitons, echinoderms. At extreme negative tides that occur at new and full moons, the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve tide pools reveal creatures you wouldn’t ever encounter in their natural habitat without diving.

On the street right beside the ranger station, we noticed a FOR RENT sign on a house. [Read more…] about Mindful tech hack: Make Nature your default browser

I’m rereading Dr. Dan Siegel’s book Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain. Dan writes:

People who use their minds to reflect on the inner nature of their mental lives grow circuits in the brain that link widely separated areas to one another [think amygdala, limbic regions, prefrontal cortex]. This linkage, called “neural integration,” creates the coordination and balance of the nervous system. Another term that some researchers use for this is “self-regulation.” In the nervous system, regulation is created through neural integration.

This morning I found myself one click away from automatically checking email. My finger was in motion towards the Mail icon at the bottom of my iPhone screen when I noticed the automatic movement, and stopped.

What led me to notice and stop? [Read more…] about Self-regulation strength training starts here…

As parents, it’s as critical to keep our eye on the creative and beautiful as it is to identify the worrisome and harmful. It’s easy to loose sight of the positive potential of technology amidst a dialogue that focuses a lot (validly) on the addictive pulls of tech in our lives and our children’s lives today. We’re wired to scan for threats—we’re naturals at finding the worrisome. I’m sure you’ve noticed. We need to make a conscious effort to identify the amazing, beautiful, and awesome. This week I noticed something creative and beautiful—an Augmented Reality app called Music Everywhere, designed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. The creators describe it as an Augmented Reality Piano Improvisation system. I’m not the only one who recognized this app as creative and beautiful. It was awarded Grand Prize in the 2017 Unity/Microsoft Hololens developer contest out of 1000 applicants. [Read more…] about Seeking the creative and beautiful in tech today