Posts Tagged ‘mindfulness and technology’

Increased productivity without email

My note:

In 2006, the same year when SCSU finally announced email as the formal form of communication (replacing paper), the Chronicle posted a seminal article:

E-Mail is for Old People

https://www.chronicle.com/article/e-mail-is-for-old-people/

[Microsoft] ‘Slack built the right tool for the wrong way to work.’

The company found that switching all of its client information and tasks to the list-making platform Trello helped workers stay on the same page without feeling overwhelmed by perpetual email chains, he says.

 

 

electronics and mental health

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/27/754362629/the-scientific-debate-over-teens-screens-and-mental-health


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more on electronics and mental health in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mental+health

the wired child

Forget Screen Time Rules — Lean In To Parenting Your Wired Child, Author Says

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/52899/forget-screen-time-rules-lean-in-to-parenting-your-wired-child-author-says

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/15/679304393/forget-screen-time-rules-lean-in-to-parenting-your-wired-child

The overuse of technology has overtaken drugs, sex and bullying as the biggest parental worry, according to the annual Brigham Young and Deseret News American Family Survey.

the intersection of child development and digital media: the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.

The American Academy of Pediatrics supports this idea of joint media engagement, basically engaging alongside your kids, as you suggest, whether with games, videos or social media. But isn’t there such a thing as too much screen time?

When people talk about addiction, I think it’s weird we want to blame the digital media because you can form unhealthy relationships with lots of things — food, sex, work, money.

We’re using screens as a babysitter.

There’s an interesting study that recently came out that looked at how parents and young children were interacting around devices. It showed that this joint media engagement is not happening.

I feel like part of the problem is that parents are getting essentially abstinence-only education, like in sex education. The research on that says, if all you hear is, “Just say no,” it has no positive effects.

Nobody actually thinks we’re going to have a world without [tech]. They’re aiming for that healthy relationship. A healthy relationship is you being able to have the autonomy to make good decisions.

Tech Neck

A Healing Yoga Sequence to Ease Neck + Shoulder Pain

We spend hours in front of our computers and phones, and the repetitive movement patterns can cause neck and shoulder strain. This sequence will help.
FEB 8, 2016https://www.yogajournal.com/practice/healing-yoga-sequence-ease-neck-shoulder-pain

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more on contemplative computing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=contemplative

social media addiction

Social media copies gambling methods ‘to create psychological cravings’

Methods activate ‘same brain mechanisms as cocaine’ and leads to users experiencing ‘phantom’ notification buzzing, experts warn

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/08/social-media-copies-gambling-methods-to-create-psychological-cravings

Social media platforms are using the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and ingrain their products in the lives of their users, experts warn.

atasha Schüll, the author of Addiction by Designwhich reported how slot machines and other systems are designed to lock users into a cycle of addiction.

Whether it’s Snapchat streaks, Facebook photo-scrolling, or playing CandyCrush, Schüll explained, you get drawn into “ludic loops” or repeated cycles of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback — and the rewards are just enough to keep you going.

Like gambling, which physically alters the brain’s structure and makes people more susceptible to depression and anxiety, social media use has been linked to depression and its potential to have an adverse psychological impact on users cannot be overlooked or underestimated.

Tech insiders have previously said “our minds can be hijacked” and that Silicon Valley is addicting us to our phones, while some have confessed they ban their kids from using social media.

However, the number of monthly active users of Facebook hit 2.13 billion earlier this year, up 14% from a year ago. Despite the furore around its data privacy issues, the social media monolith posted record revenues for the first quarter of 2018, making $11.97bn, up 49% on last year.

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more on addiction in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=addiction

meditative practices help the body

Harvard Study: Clearing Your Mind Affects Your Genes And Can Lower Your Blood Pressure

new study indicates that people who meditated over an eight-week period had a striking change in the expression of 172 genes that regulate inflammation, circadian rhythms and glucose metabolism. And that, in turn, was linked to a meaningful decrease in their blood pressure.

“This is a major step to overcome the innate bias that has developed in medicine over the last hundred years or so,” says Dr. Herbert Benson, who started promoting what he called “the relaxation response” more than four decades ago. “Going back to penicillin in the 1920s, we have been inexorably dependent on medication, surgery and procedures.”

His goal is to establish the relaxation response and other techniques that calm the brain — yoga, t’ai chi, breathing exercises, repetitive prayer and other meditative practices — as a “third leg” of medical treatment, along with medication and surgical procedures.

Previous studies of other diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis, have suggested improvement after meditation. But, “this is the first study where we have a nice, clean, clinical read-out,” says Towia Libermann,
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more on meditation in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=meditation
more on mindfulness in this IMS blgo
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mindfulness

bingewatching

Stop Binge-Watching TV

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/07/09/binge_watching_tv_why_you_need_to_stop_.html

It seems that the perils of social media spill back to previous medias. The migration of TV content from TV to streaming (Neflix, Hulu etc) enables the trend of binge watching, which in addictiveness resembles greatly concerns typical for social media such as : addictiveness, poor concentration (AKA multitasking) etc.

Can the lessons learned by “disconnect,” “contemplative computing” and similar practices in mindfulness be used to deal with binge watching?

Below is selected bibliography. Please feel welcome to add your titles, findings and ideas how to resolve the issue

Matrix, S. (2014). The Netflix Effect: Teens, Binge Watching, and On-Demand Digital Media Trends. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 6(1), 119. http://login.libproxy.stcloudstate.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dedo%26AN%3d98488719%26site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite

Bazilian, E. (2014). Vincent Kartheiser: the Mad Men star stays away from social media but doesn’t mind an occasional bout of binge-watching. ADWEEK, (15). 58. http://login.libproxy.stcloudstate.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dedsgao%26AN%3dedsgcl.365691198%26site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite