Mindfulness for Learning in a Digital-Physical World
Think Tank: Mindfulness
Heather Van Fleet
Mindfulness for Learning in a Digital-Physical World
It’ s been called the 79 th organ, and although this organ doesn’ t exist inside the human body, the smartphone has become an essential part of existence for many of us. At times attached to our hand, or close by in our pocket or bag, it’ s often the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing at night.
It is, after all, our connection to the digital world. A world where bills are paid, meeting times are set, and news updates are found. Importantly, the virtual world is not, in itself, bad. Research, however, shows a darker side to our technology use- a mindless one.
The smartphone: our 79 th organ Scrolling and phubbing: our words reveal digital culture as mainstream culture
Many of us know this dark side well. If you’ ve ever found yourself lost in a black hole of unintended scrolling on social media. Or if you’ ve been with someone who paid more attention to their phone than you during a conversation, so common nowadays there’ s a name for it: phubbing, or phone snubbing. Of if you’ ve ever found yourself googling endlessly into the wee hours of the night in front of a brightly lit screen, the digital world disrupting your ability to sleep and consolidate memories.
On average, adults spend 3 – 5 hours a day on their smartphone or tablet devices and tweens and teens an average of 6 – 9 hours. So digital culture is not youth culture; it is mainstream culture. We are all googling, messaging, swiping, scrolling, and phubbing often – and maybe more often than we should.
As it turns out, seeking and reading bite-sized bits of information for hours on end puts us in a state of constant distraction, weakening our voluntary attention system and our ability to process what we encounter at a deeper level( Carr, 2010). In other words, the way we access information on the internet changes our brain. In the words of a college senior,‘ I am unable to focus on anything in a
Pay attention while walking: evidence of how distracted we are by tech on a daily basis