NO TIME TO THINK examines the physical and mental health problems associated with the new Digital Age, as well as the difficulty of finding “time to think” even in academia, when the demand for instant response and information is so strong. It also examines the problem of addiction to text messaging, the internet and video games, particularly for children and students.
In doing the piece, I became more familiar with the work of University of Washington Information School professor David Levy, a former Xerox researcher, who first began to be concerned about the problems of finding balance in an increasingly digital world some fifteen years ago, and has been exploring the problem and possible solution ever since.
Levy is a real pioneer in helping us to understand the pitfalls inherent in the new technologies and how we might find ways to make them our tools instead of our masters. He introduced Dean Paton and I to the work of Vannevar Bush, a scientist who was looking for technological ways of dealing with the problem of “information overload” in the 1940s and whose work led to the development of the Internet. But Levy is equally convinced by the writing of Catholic theologian, Joseph Pieper, a contemporary of Bush, who warned that our new technologies were actually leading to a sped-up world of “total work.”
In the piece, we also introduce viewers to psychologist Hilarie Cash and software developer Justin Magaram, who are working on various ways to prevent Internet and video game addiction in children and adults. We also meet Dr. Sarah Speck, director of the Wellness Clinic at Swedish Hospital, who sees the coronary effects of stress caused by our increasingly time-pressed culture, and Enrique Godreau, a venture capitalist who still hopes that newer technologies can help bring back balance to our lives.
After working on the story, both Dean Paton and I are ready for a little time away from the computer! I hope you enjoy the piece.
Comments
Posted by Guy Burneko (not verified) on Sat, 02/28/2009 - 10:30am
Your program was timely, relevant and well composed; I am grateful. It was also informative and prompted me to look further, online.
Some of my own work connects directly with the theme of this program, including the relevance of the relatively unknown Joef Pieper.
Below is a somewhat compact (and mildly jargon-laden) abstract of something scholarly I've been writing in the same vein.....You might enjoy knowing that the greek 'skhole,' origin of the English word school, originally connoted leisure, i. e., unhurried time for reflection, etc.
Thanks once more
Guy
Contemplative Ecology
©2009 Guy Burneko, Ph. D.
Director, The Institute for Contemporary/Ancient Learning
7736 28th Ave. NW
Seattle, WA 98117
Gburneko1@aol.com 206.322.4226
Abstract
Degradation of the environment calls unselfcritical humanism into question. Reducing nature to a set of objects, we deracinate the “communion of subjects” in which we and all our relations emerge together as the processes of cosmogenesis. To abate our impositions and perform value and meaning as intrinsic to our relations with one another and the natural universe and not as externally calculated or commodified may be to move from anthropocentrism to a contemplative, sage-like “functional anthropocosmology” in our ethos and our ecopolitics. Adapting the idiom of Chinese philosophy we can say, e. g., the practical “contemplative” and “comprehensive” orientation, guan, and “resonance,” kan-ying, of the ecohumanist presence the “continuum of being” in hir conduct as a context and a corrective to an unrelievedly instrumentalist, utilitarian, orientation. Other intercultural and interdisciplinary hybridizations also help us to do so. Creative “cross-cultural anachronisms” (Hall and Ames) offer boundary-loosening analogies between nondualizing traditions that provide ecohumanism an "evocative hermeneutics" (Wu) of what complexity theorist Kauffman calls '"reinventing the sacred," Berry, the ecologian, "reinventing the human" and New Confucian Tu, "the continuity of being." The aim of this transdisciplinary paper is an evocative contemplative hermeneutics of post-instrumental ecological awareness and conduct.
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