Technological Mindfulness

Now, I don’t do a lot of things the right way, and I am guilty of being a tech-nerd at times.  However, I truly think that I use technology mindfully. After watching the TED talk about quitting the internet, and reading the article about simplifying, I realized that I am right on track.  I can find balance, and I hope that children can learn to find that balance as well.

We need to stop multi-tasking when it is evident that our mind is split in half, preventing our brains from successfully focusing on anything at all.  Many of us can fairly easily  multi-task. But we need to learn to step back and ask ourselves: “am I successfully focusing on any one subject, or am I just ‘skimming’ multiple subjects?”  Once in a while I will catch myself listening to a lecture, skimming a separate article, and working on a homework assignment all at the same time. I have to make myself slow down and backtrack.  Look back at what I worked on and make sure everything was absorbed from the lecture, I have to re-skim the articles, and generally have to double proof-read my assignments.  I generally find myself slapping myself in the forehead because it takes me twice as long to have to go back and re-do all that I’ve done than it would if I would do one at a time.

I believe that we lose a lot from being permanently attached to our different devices.  For example, just the other day my aunt was reading a story/explaining a heartfelt message to her daughter, after she read the article, she looked up and realized that her daughter “was listening” but was also flipping through Facebook. First of all, she was not present in their conversation.  Second, she was multi-tasking at something that should not be multi-tasked.  Just because this young girl could not put her phone down for five minutes, there were hurt feelings.  Our mobile devices help us damage relationships, help us become unfocused, and assists us in the ability to spread our minds thin across multiple tabs.  Technology can do a lot of damage if used wrong.  But flip that situation, and our mobile devices help us build relationships that we may never have been able to build at long distances, they help us relax by removing ourselves and indulging in different medias, and they can assist us in the ability to multi-task successfully.

Technology used mindfully can be the difference between damaging and building.