Every spring, I lead an Upper School interim trip to southern Utah near the Four Corners area. The rugged landscape is, in many ways, a gift to the students. They learn to push themselves. Some face their fear of heights as we climb up steep faces to stare at amazingly preserved Ancestral Puebloan ruins that are more than 800 years old.   They experience the wilderness utterly and completely.   But, the biggest gift is something else: the gift of being “unplugged” and “disconnected.”  There is no cell service in the canyon country of Cedar Mesa.

 

I have a pretty strict rule of no headphones on the drive out so that we can all talk. We share music over the speakers, and many use their phones as cameras when we are in the field.  But, once we are in the back country, the phones really don’t come out of the backpacks very often.    Last spring, after two days into the trip, many students commented that they got better sleep on the trip than they had all year long.  Some wondered why as they felt they did not always sleep well on past camping trips.  However, the answer was obvious: they weren’t looking at a screen in the hours before they went to bed.

 

I want to challenge members of our community to better manage technology this year. It’s hard. We need these devices to live and to work. But, we can control them if we choose.   From an academic point of view, technology can be very important, and, in some cases, central to managing one’s work flow.  But, it can also be a hindrance and a distraction.  For very young brains, we know too much screen time is not good; plenty has been written on this already.

 

We all have the ability to better control the impact that technology has on human communication and relationships.  Despite the intention, technology can encourage poor communications.  Emails are fraught with problems.  Tone is often misunderstood, and needless conflicts emerge.  Technology isolates the individual. It cuts us off and numbs us to the power and impacts of words.  Just read anonymous posting on the Internet. They encourage meanness and falsehoods.

 

This week, there was a great article in the New York Times from Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T. and author of  Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. (Click here)

 

Her editorial, “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk” offers brilliant insights into how technology impacts human relationships and self-understanding: “Our phones are not accessories, but psychologically potent devices that change not just what we do but who we are.”  She talks about how phones and electronic  devices affect our ability to empathize and understand one another: “A VIRTUOUS circle links conversation to the capacity for self-reflection. When we are secure in ourselves, we are able to really hear what other people have to say. At the same time, conversation with other people, both in intimate settings and in larger social groups, leads us to become better at inner dialogue.”

 

We have all come across a group of people sitting together at the same table or in close proximity, but with each person glued to their phone. I find it painful to come across these scenes.  Parents can help play a role in modeling better behavior.  Ultimately, it begins with us. Are we willing to turn the phone off?  Are we willing to meet with someone in person to discuss an issue? We will find that our relationships are stronger when we have face-to-face contact.   Turkle’s piece talks about how easy it is for our brains to revert to a pre-technology state.  It happened on my interim last year, and good things happened.