I recently wrapped up a sabbatical of 4 1/2 years working as a newspaper journalist. It was heartwarming that during all those years I never stopped receiving interview requests, which were bittersweet as I had to politely turn them all down. That is how consuming my “day job” was. It left me no bandwidth for continuing anything else, including my own blogging, speaking or guesting on webinars and podcasts. (more…)
Is it me?? Is our world is tilting toward the brink, or are we merely witnessing normal global growing pains?
Oh how I wish the premise of my book Parenting for Peace had become obsolete in the 7+ years since it was published. But alas, the premise of my book could not be more relevant right now:
If we really want change the world, we need to raise a generation “built for peace”—hardwired at brain level with the capacities needed to foster empathic interdependence and innovative solutions in our challenged world.
At this point in human history, I guess I would dare to ask, “Why be a parent if not to try and bring a peacemaker on earth?” It might be peace through embroidery or engineering or being a CEO. Ultimately, our consciously enacted wish for our children becomes that they unfold as individuals with the heart to embrace and exemplify peacefulness, the psyche to experience joy and intimacy, the mind to innovate solutions to social and ecological challenges, and the will to enact such innovations.
That kind of human is never a genetically predetermined given, but the result of dynamic interactions between genetics and environment — with parents being the most influential environmental variable.
Yikes, that is pretty daunting, right?!
I’ve been doing “Wired Wednesday” for a couple years now, writing about various concerns related to our collective digital dependence. Over that time, yes, I have become more mindful about some of my own digital dependencies. Yes, I (most nights) disable WiFi so we can sleep free of excess EMF exposure. Yes, my basic hygiene includes not looking at my smartphone when someone is speaking to me (and encouraging the same courtesy from them). But no, I have not jumped ship from Facebook.
All I can say is, if you’re a Facebook user, regardless of how infrequently, take a look at this Slate article by Katie Day Good: “Why I Printed My Facebook.” It simply describes what Good found when she decided to download and print out her entire Facebook dossier. It totaled 10,057 pages, 4,612 of which were nothing but “disembodied ‘likes'” that Good chose not to print.
I did not write this. I am curating this. It is a mind-blowing article that appeared in Washingtonian magazine.
This story chillingly details a phenomenon that every parent should be aware of in today’s wired world. It sheds light on a fearful dimension of the digital age that I have not yet explored in this blog…and, in fact, of which I was unaware until I read this article.
This isn’t something that just happens to other people. The writer sounds like me, her son sounds like my son. Their family, their values, sound like ours… and, I’m guessing if you’re into Parenting for Peace stuff… maybe like yours. She writes,
“I couldn’t understand how this had happened. … My husband and I poured everything we had into nurturing an empathetic, observant child. Until then, it had seemed to be working. Teachers and family friends had always commented on Sam’s kindness and especially his gentleness toward the ‘underdog’.”
Read Anonymous’ article, “What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right: A Washington family’s nightmare year” at Washingtonian’s site here.
Whether you’re curious, captivated or concerned about our digital dependence and device devotion, join me on (most) Wednesdays so we can explore it together. (Sign up here if you want to be sure not to miss anything!) ….. …..
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Photo-illustration by C.J. Burton for Washingtonian
When my book Parenting for Peace came out in 2012, the handheld device revolution hadn’t yet reached its tipping point, so smartphone brain wasn’t yet a thing.
The screens I discussed in my book were DVDs in the backs of SUV seats, video games, computer screens, television and other such notions that have become quaint-sounding in just a few years.
But even before the smartphone brain era had taken hold, I posed in my book the idea that we’re faced with a “Peaceful Parenting Conundrum” that goes as follows:
One of the most urgent questions for parents today is, How do we most gracefully and fruitfully navigate these dual realities?! (more…)
Of the many aspects of our digital dependence I’ve been writing about for over a year now, the most troubling by far is device addiction. The entire online machinery is designed to foster device addiction in us, and–more troubling–in our children, whose developing neural landscapes are more vulnerable to being fundamentally shaped by engineered device addiction.
If you’ve been following Wired Wednesdays, you already know this. But for folks who haven’t been looped in with me on that, I’ve put together a sort of Cliffs Notes blog post that pulls together threads from several installments over the past year.
I wrote it for New Earth Nation, where I’m on faculty in the School of Health & Wellness at their university. Ryan, the cool millennial who maintains the blog, included this message after he published it: “Yet another truth bomb from Dr. Marcy Axness! This one really caused me to look at my own device use and I’m already seeing a difference in my usage and self awareness around this. 🙂 Thank you so much.” (more…)
My ex-husband*, our two grown kids and I recently switched from AT&T to Verizon for our cell service. [*A marriage may end, but a family cellular plan goes on!] In the process I got a new free LG smartphone.
As I was familiarizing myself with my new phone—blessedly similar to my former Android—I was bummed to discover that it doesn’t have a notification light. You know, that little blinker that alerts you that you have notifications? Even from across the room?
I couldn’t believe it. I went online to read reviews of my smartphone, and sure enough, I saw that this was other folks’ main (and mostly only) complaint about this phone: no notification light.
Well, it only took a day or so for me to realize I was relieved to have suffered this kind of personal tech “regression.” My device would no longer be winking and blinking at me, beckoning me to “Pick me up, light me up. Press my buttons. Let me manipulate your brain chemicals!”
And as timing would have it, I stumbled upon this article that same week.
Huzzah! Now I had expert corroboration that my missing blinking smartphone light (more…)
I’ve been burying the lead, as they say, for some months now: I have joined the faculty of New Earth University, an international community that brings together creative curriculum, conscious collaboration and meaningful resources into a gorgeous, paradigm-shifting learning model.
This development really deserves its own post, and life has simply been too busy to attend to that. For now I’ll just share my latest blog at NEU–a deeply personal reflection on my disappointment 16 years ago upon seeing The Vagina Monologues, and my opportunity, finally, to put it in writing and perform it as a “Spotlight” monologue during our community’s recent V-Day run of performances. (We closed just last night!)
My thoughts clearly plucked a chord within many women in our audiences, as you can see in these Facebook comments. Their desire to pass it on to future generations is the best praise I could ever hope for! Here it is, for you:
At the end of each issue of my favorite weekly news digest The Week is a 2-page section called “The last word.” It features a substantive (polite word for “long”) piece of extraordinary writing. In the final issue of last year they ran this article on digital life and attention by Craig Mod, a must-read for folks mindful enough to wonder about the effects digital dependence has on something as intangible as your attention.
Neuroplasticity (the ability–nay, propensity–of our brains to change in response to experience) has been one of the most exciting scientific revelations of the past generation. It is what allows for some of our most inspiring human capacities, like emotional healing and personal reinvention.
And now, neuroplasticity is leveraged by digital engineers to guide your handheld device behavior by manipulating your neurochemistry. Think I’m being dramatic or leaning on hyperbole? Check out “Brain Hacking: Hijacking You From the Inside” featuring Anderson Cooper’s sobering 60 Minutes segment. (And if you tend toward conspiracy thinking, you might want to skip Mod’s section discussing his awareness of cunningly shifting algorithms during his Clash of Clans experience. Omg.)
I offer you this beautifully expressed article (originally from BackChannel/Wired) as a New Year’s gift — a palette-cleanser after a rough past year, and some inspiration (if even just vicarious) toward reclaiming sovereignty over something we’ve always taken for granted, something unspeakably valuable: our attention.
This one’s personal, folks. It’s one thing to recognize the discouraging association between smartphones and impatience, and it’s a whole other thing to experience that impatience on a daily basis in a potentially deadly way.
Creeping along a clogged-up patch of the 101 freeway on a recent trip to Los Angeles, I was gob-smacked to see how many drivers around me were flagrantly texting – nothing covert or sneaky about it! Phones were right up in front of their faces, and apparently their one free hand — or maybe a knee — was steering.
I witnessed it in the lanes on either side of me, in the car in front of me, in my rear-view… seemingly all around me. It was like that classic scene out of any B horror movie: everywhere the bedeviled heroine looks, a monster looms!
But we were all moving in the same direction, we were all moving slowly, and I could change lanes to navigate away from these folks.
In the remote forest community where I live, none of those mitigating circumstances apply on the 2-lane mountain highway we all must drive to go anywhere. To the left is a particularly infamous little section called The S-Curves. But in reality, the entire road out of our village features continuous blind curves and therefore solid double yellow lines all the way.
The point of my discussion today isn’t the horribly dangerous epidemic of texting while driving, as in my above 101 Fwy example. That’s a conversation for another day. What’s been weighing heavy on my mind the past many months is the suspicion that our culture’s increasingly wired life is making (mostly young) people less patient and more impulsive in general — not just when they’re online. For example, when they’re driving our 2-lane road. (more…)
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