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In our evening parenting class, last Tuesday, we had a lively discussion about the pros and cons of technology.  Many of the pros and cons are obvious but the point about creativity is thought provoking.

How Is Our Creativity Better Off Without Technology?

In our group, I read the following insightful passage from Katrina Kenison’s memoir, Mitten Strings for God (Despite the name, it’s not a religious book.  It is an excellent book about a mother’s story of simplifying life and focussing on one’s core family values).

Our lives are a series of choices.  Some we deliberate over, others we make automatically.  But as we begin to live our lives more consciously, with more attention to the details, we become increasingly aware of just how many decisions we do make in the course of every day – from what we toss into our grocery carts to the images we allow into our living rooms.  We begin to choose foods that promote healthy bodies and, in the same way, we begin to choose sensory experiences that nurture our souls.  Knowing that the shape and mood we bring to a day has a deep effect on our children’s own sense of well-being, we begin to pay more attention to the atmosphere in our homes.  We may become more thoughtful in our words and gestures, more deliberate as we attend to our surroundings.  The challenge, of course, is to make our choices creatively, so that the details of our lives support and nourish what is best in us….The world we live in is a world of our own making, the sum of all our collective choices.  Yet so many parents feel powerless to make good choices, sensing that the pull of the media is stronger than they are.  How can any of us protect our children from the relentless display of violence, sex, noise, inappropriate humour, and advertising in a media-driven world that is already saturated with these images?  How will our children resist such influences if we can’t manage to resist them ourselves? (p.44-45)

Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and psychologist, and author of the eye-opening book, Alone Together, discusses many concerns about technology, including the loss of solitude in our lives, which many also associate with a time of creativity.  She explains that we need solitude in our lives to feel refreshed and restored.  However, if we are not comfortable being peaceful with our own company, we are not able to experience solitude.

“To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself, by yourself, otherwise you will only know how to be lonely.”

~ Sherry Turkle, Alone Together, p.72

From these perspectives, we can summarize that “less is more”.  By limiting the amount of exposure to screens, we can be more creative, peaceful, refreshed and restored.

How is Our Creativity Enhanced with Technology?

In Clive Thompson’s book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, he documents how technology allows us to be more creative.  He states that all the connections that are now possible between people, thanks to technology, lead to greater creativity and productivity.  He writes about the “theory of multiples”.  Sociologists have researched the history of major modern inventions (such as the radio around the 1900’s) and scientific discoveries, and found that many of the significant ones had been discovered by different people, in different countries within the same short time-span.  The theory is that these big ideas emerged around the same time because of the influence of the environment – the shared conversations, shared information, tools, and technologies.  With the advances of technology, there is now much more opportunity to collaborate, share ideas and stimulate each other’s creativity.

In addition, in his book he cites research by Lunsford (2001), which claims that “We are  in the midst of a Literacy Revolution”.  In her research, she found it stunning how much students now write outside of class.  She discovered students were more adept at knowing how to debate, gather evidence, listen to others and concede points.  We are writing more than ever before, through blogs, emails, texts, websites and social media posts.

Reading Clive Thompson’s book is helping me to embrace the positives of technology.  I realize, in my own family, that it’s true we are all writing/creating more than we would be without technology.  Through my husband’s work he has to communicate and write throughout his work day, our daughter loves to read and is in the midst of starting her own website/blog to share book reviews with other kids.  Our son loves design, and receives great enjoyment from design programs which allow him to design modern homes.  I love to be creative and my website/blog gives me the perfect outlet to be creative and create content.  Of course, the answer always comes back to balance, moderation, and consciously choosing how we take in content.

Perhaps Clive Thompson is right when he says, “Technology boosts our cognitive abilities – making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever before”!

I’ll leave  you with this quote to ponder:

Every technological innovation – from the printing press to the telegraph – has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today.  We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized.  But as in the past, we adapt, learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old.  ~ (from the inside cover of Smarter Than You Think)

I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Warmly,

 

 

 

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