Contemplative computing may sound like an oxymoron, but it's really quite simple. It's about how to use information technologies and social media so they're not endlessly distracting and demanding, but instead help us be more mindful, focused and creative.
My book on contemplative computing, The Distraction Addiction, will be published by Little, Brown and Co. in August 2013. In the meantime, this 2011 talk is a good introduction to the project and its big ideas.
David Shing, the man who helps figure out future trends for AOL, is fed up with Facebook and Twitter.
In fact he has told his bosses that defriending and unfollowing are going to be the next big thing as users realise that the increasing "noise" on social networks is counterproductive.
"The web is so overwhelming, so then it becomes underwhelming [because] it's so hard to find anything," he says....
Shing... believes the future is all about the "attention economy" – a world in which content is valuable enough to dwell on and more likely to be curated by friends than pushed by "in-your-face advertisers".
Or as Joe Fernandez from Klout.com – a kind of page ranking service for people – put it: "The web has shifted from being page-centric to people-centric."
I still don't like the term "attention economy," but I have to agree that having digital circles closer to one's Dunbar Number makes sense to me. I've been pretty profligate in accepting Facebook friend requests, but frankly there are half a dozen people I communicate with there; the rest are of marginal interest (and I'm of marginal interest to them).
Indeed, I've been thinking about making deleting my Facebook account at the end of the year, and inviting all my current Facebook friends to the new one. A couple weeks ago I spent a morning with Jarno Koponen, the founder of Futureful, a kind of social information-finding service. I was struck by the profile that the system made for me, based on what I tweet and link to on Facebook: I look like I'm much more obsessed with politics, the debt crisis, and the general stupdity of humankind than I really am.
More generally, it makes me wonder how well my online profile, and the couple years' worth of tweets and posts and reposts, represents my interests now; hence my thinking that it would be interesting to experiment with erasing my poast and starting over.
the "doors of perception" are opened [and] all life takes on a completely new meaning: the real sense of our own existence, which is normally veiled and distorted by the routine distractions of an alienated life, is now revealed in a central intuition. What was lost and dispersed in the relative meaningless and triviality of purposeless behavior (living like a machine, pushed around by the impulsions and suggestions from others) is brought together in fully integrated conscious significance. (158)
He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. (160-161)
Watch this delightful video of a baby being confused by a magazine. (You've probably already seen it, come to think of it.)
It's been commented on, linked to, etc., in a variety of places. It claims to show a baby figuring out how to use an iPad, then being confused when the same gestures don't work on a print magazine. "The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives," one post says.
At the end of the video, a caption declares,
For my 1 year old daughter, a magazine is an iPad that does not work.
It will remain so for her whole life.
Steve Jobs has coded a part of her OS.
The baby is really cute, the parents seem proud that she's able to figure out the iPad so quickly (look! Now that exclusive kindergarten will admit her! Her future is assured!), and the whole thing is played as an example of how, thanks to growing up with all these cool technologies, digital natives have profoundly different ideas about the world.
It feels kind of like I'm kicking a sweet-tempered, crippled puppy to point out that the video is a petting zoo of misunderstandings about our interaction with technology.
Let's start at the beginning. First off, babies play with categories, and experiment with their world all the time. Sometimes this has humorous results. When I was in college, one of my friends was babysitting her professor's toddler. The delightful tot looked at me when I came in the room, and said, very clearly, "Dada!"
Naturally, Luise and I both thought this was hilarious. Professor Baby then pointed at Luise's little dorm room refrigerator and said, just as clearly, "Dada!"
This is what babies do: they call things by funny names, or try out naming things and see how we react. The fact that Professor Baby called me and the refrigerator "Dada" did not mean that she was experimenting with heteronormative ideas about family structure, or declaring a cybernetic kinship with the drink-chilling appliance, or commenting on the fluidity of the boundary between people and machines. She either wanted to see how we would react, or she had recently learned the word "dada" and, like any owner of a cool new thing, wanted to use it.
So how much does a baby's world view (or cute misunderstanding) tell us about The Future of Things? Very little. Will the girl in question never, ever understand how magazines or printed media work? Will they forever remain inaccessible and uninteresting? In other words, will her year-old world view be the one that shapes her ideas about media forever? Extremely unlikely.
The other thing that's problematic here is the idea that "Steve Jobs has coded a part of her OS." Let's leave aside the idea that minds are like operating systems, and let other people have that debate. Why is this something good? Why is it cute that a toddler can have their ideas about reality shaped by a CEO (albeit one that everyone, myself included, has some pretty strong, positive feelings about these days)? Would it be just as good if the CEO of Wal Mart, or the head of Goldman Sachs, or Hu Jintao, had "coded a part of her OS?"
Now, I get the syllogism at work here: Steve Jobs was a genius; my baby is being programmed by Steve Jobs; therefore, my baby is a genius. Note, though, how logically disconnected it actually is.
And why is it notable and good to have any part of your brain or mind that strongly shaped by a corporation? I think the assumption at work here is that this kind of thing is inevitable, and it's just good taste on her parents' part that it's Steve Jobs who's tuning up the toddler's brain, rather than Bill Gates or Meg Whitman. (Babies whose parents don't love them give them Windows tablets.)
Okay, enough puppy kicking for the moment. Time to see how my wife's new iPhone is doing.
I've been impressed at how heartfelt the messages on these impromptu memorials have been. They're as good a demonstration as you could find of how, for better or worse, devices manage to insinuate and embed themselves in our lives.
Apparently I'm spending too much time on my laptop, or the cat can sense that it's got a new terabyte hard drive and she decided it was time to make her move.
In more serious news, I think I've finally got a handle on the Buddhist monk bloggers section of the book. It's been a knife-fight in a phone booth, but I'm FINALLY winning. And once again, it's a triumph in which the simple approach wins out. As always.
Look under the listings of Hachette, the conglomerate that owns my publisher, Little Brown. (And I swear so long as I live, I'll never get tired of saying "my publisher, Little Brown"!)
About Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
I write about people, technology, and the worlds they make.
My book on contemplative computing, The Distraction Addiction, will be published by Little, Brown and Company in 2013. (It will also appear in Dutch, Russian, Spanish, Chinese and Korean in 2013 and 2014.)
