Honing Our Digital Craft
By the time they have completed these five exercises, my students have learned quite a lot. They have explored their habitual ways of operating online, noticed when these largely unconscious patterns have worked well for them and when they haven’t, and prepared guidelines that reflect their new understandings of how to conduct themselves online in the future. As a final assignment, I ask them to write one last reflection that summarizes what they’ve learned from the exercises and from the ten-week-long conversation with their fellow students and with me. Now that you and I have arrived at this point, I want to offer you my reflections—my summary of this process and the kinds of insights it leads to—based not just on what I’ve observed in my students but also what I’ve noticed about my own digital craftwork.
The Stages of Digital Craft
At the beginning of the book, I suggested that we might profitably view our digital activities as a kind of craftwork. Doing this, I suggested, would help us to see how to improve the quality of our online activities by noticing certain parallels with sports and handcrafts. We could enhance our performance by adopting a certain attitude: being intentional or purposeful about what we were setting out to accomplish and by caring enough to do it well. And this caring could be realized by bringing the best of our embodied skills to bear and by engaging in an ongoing process of learning.
Now I want to introduce one additional dimension of craftwork, which I will use to further organize the kinds of learning that emerge from the exercises: Craftwork proceeds in stages. The central stage, of course, is the actual doing, the performance. This is when the calligrapher deposits ink on the page, when the cellist plays her instrument, when the tennis player engages in the game. But there are actually two other stages, which are no less necessary because they are less visible: preparing and finishing. Indeed, there would be no well-tuned performances without these two other stages. In the preparatory stage, the calligrapher makes sure his tools are sharp and ready to hand, the cellist tunes her instrument, and the tennis player stretches and prepares himself mentally for the match. And once the performance is over, the craftsperson tends to her body and her tools, in preparation for moving on to something else.
Tim Ingold, an anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen who has extensively studied handcrafts, illustrates these three stages by describing the process of cutting a plank of wood with a saw. First is the preparation: collecting the tools and materials, sharpening the saw, measuring and marking the plank, and making the initial cut. Then comes the main performance: the rhythmical sawing of the board. And finally the finishing up: the delicate last cuts to sever the two pieces of board, and the cleanup or preparation for the next woodworking activity.1
Ingold draws an analogy between doing craftwork and taking a journey. Think, for example, about the work involved in taking a family vacation. The preparatory phase includes the planning (where shall we go? how long shall we stay?), the packing, and locking up the house. Then comes the travel itself: the hours in the car, the decisions about where to eat and how to respond to local driving conditions. Last is the arrival at the destination and the various rituals associated with that: checking in, unpacking, and settling in.
Once pointed out, these stages seem pretty obvious. Everything, in a sense, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But what I’ve noticed over years of helping people observe their online behavior is that we rarely pay much attention to the requirements of these different stages. As you have probably seen in the exercises, we often drift online without much clarity of intention. We wander through one or more tasks without the focus the work deserves. And we miss the opportunity to pause or rest when we’re done. But in performing the exercises in this book, people discover a number of ways to counter these tendencies.
In Box 9.1 I have tried to summarize the main discoveries people make by organizing them according to the stages to which they apply. But just to be clear: I don’t mean to suggest that everyone does (or should) make all these discoveries. As I’ve said throughout the book, no one set of rules or guidelines will apply to all of us across differences in age, culture, context, cognitive and emotional predisposition, and so on. Still, I think there is something quite useful in reflecting on what we’ve been learning by noticing the stage of craftwork where they most readily apply.
. . .
Box 9.1: The Stages of Our Digital Craftwork
Stage 1: Preparing
• Clarify your intention: What are you aiming to accomplish?
• Establish focus: Can you bring sufficient focus to your current task? What do you need to do to deepen your focus?
• Prepare your body: Can you adopt a relaxed and attentive posture? What stands in the way?
• Prepare your environment: Is your environment free of unnecessary distractions?
Stage 2: Performing
• Steer a successful course by noticing choice points and choosing how to respond to them in order to stay true to your intention.
• As you proceed, periodically return to the points in Stage 1. Are you still true to your intention? Is your degree of focus sufficient for what you’re doing? Is your body (still) in a state of relaxed readiness? Is your environment (still) conducive to what you’re doing?
Stage 3: Finishing
• Notice natural break points, when you can pause or stop. (Notice the temptation not to pause or stop.)
• In pausing or stopping, let go of what you were just doing. Is switching to another online activity helpful, or is it a way to avoid pausing and resting?
• Clean up: Put your tools away, closing windows and apps, putting physical materials away.
. . .
In the remainder of this chapter, as a further means of summarizing what we’ve explored, I will discuss some of the themes that are central to this work. Let’s begin with what for me may be the most important of these themes: the importance of choice.
The Importance (and the Place) of Choice
In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Barry Schwartz, a social psychologist at Swarthmore College, pointed to the problem of living in a culture with an overwhelming abundance of choice. “When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable,” he observed. But “as the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.” The challenge for us is to determine when choice liberates and when it debilitates.2
Our online choices are sometimes debilitating when they are automatic and unconscious. There are times, to be sure, when our automated actions are right and proper—slamming on the brakes when the car in front of us unexpectedly slows down. But checking email again and again “for no good reason,” or switching tasks when we feel bored or anxious—these are often circumstances when there is no real possibility of choice, when we’re simply at the mercy of internal and external triggers, and when our habitual responses may well be unhealthy and unhelpful. Under such circumstances, a better response may be to increase the choices available to us, opening up the space of possibilities, so we can discover what else we might do. If we’re bored, maybe we should get up and take a walk. Or maybe we should keep doing what we’re doing, accepting boredom as a momentary companion as we carry on. If we’re driving when we hear the sound of a new text message, maybe we should just keep driving, simply recognizing the anxiety and the “fear of missing out” that we now feel. Maybe we should pull over to the side of the road to read the text. Or maybe we should silence, or even turn off, our phone as soon as we get in the car.
At other times, our online choices may be debilitating when they are too plentiful. Then liberation may come from reducing our options. In the focused email exercise, for example, where the task is to do email and only email, some people discover that this is the case. Thus Krista says, “I noticed a degree of what I will call peace. It was a kind of peace brought on by a lack of alternatives. I guess I’ll just attend to all of my email because that’s what I can do.” Similarly, Erin observes that she felt “relaxed and free—not pressed for time or rushing through anything.” And in the multitasking exercises, some people see that they are more successful and happier when they minimize the number of tasks they are juggling.
The challenge, of course, is knowing when to increase the number of choices and when to reduce them. Sometimes it is obvious: don’t text and drive. But most of the time, it is a matter of paying attention to the actual circumstances of our lives.
Taking Charge, Reducing Stress
When we are consciously exercising choice (or consciously choosing not to choose), we are taking control of our online lives, rather than responding passively to the circumstances that present themselves to us. Again and again in the reflections my students write, they talk about “control” and “agency” as qualities they have been learning to cultivate.
The first step is simply noticing that we don’t have control and seeing how this affects us. Says Martin: “I learned that email, along with a host of other online distractions, is something that I need to get control over. It is a source of anxiety and also at the same time of scary ambivalence. The way that I can check it compulsively without awareness or emotion connected to it feels empty. I am also amazed by how it can quickly swing my emotions, notice how it can ramp up whatever emotion it is that I am feeling, especially if that emotion is under stress.”
The next step is to discover what it will take to gain a greater measure of control. Often enough, just seeing the problem can get us a good distance toward a solution. Thus Martin concludes that “instead of letting my attention or the tasks control me, I can learn to pause, acknowledge the drift or pull on my attention, and let it go.” And Will notices that exercising control through conscious choice reduces his stress: “Multitasking seems to become unpleasant when we kind of lose control of that decision-making ability. I certainly noticed that when I was able to decide what I wanted to do and was able to act on it there was a sense of freedom and less stress.”
Will is right to notice the relationship between control and stress. Research clearly demonstrates the link. In The End of Stress as We Know It, Bruce McEwen, a leading stress researcher, points out, “In all of the research into stress, the concept of control appears again and again, the way a musical theme weaves in and out of the movements of a symphony. When stress is coupled with a lack of control, the music goes from major to minor.” And, he adds, “control doesn’t mean controlling others, telling people what to do, and generally being the top dog in the outfit; in an unstable environment the top dogs are likely to be the ones with the psychosomatic illness. Rather, it means control over one’s own life.”3
Sometimes we have sufficient control to change the objective circumstances of our lives. But even when we don’t, we have the potential to change our relationship with, and our response to, the conditions that are stressing us out. “When we can’t change our environment,” McEwen says, “this is the time to change the things we can.”4
Chronic stress, as we saw in Chapter 3, can take a serious toll on our bodies, leading in the most extreme cases to debilitating ailments and even death. Our bodies express the shock—might we even say the grief?—of living out of balance. So by paying attention to what our bodies are telling us, we’re in a position to diagnose and respond. Sometimes, we can change the objective conditions. (If reading email in bed first thing in the morning stresses us out, maybe we should stop doing it.) Other times, we may be able to reduce the extent of the stress reaction, even if we can’t eliminate the stressor. (When we’re caught in a firestorm of online and offline activity, consciously relaxing the body may mitigate some of the stress.)
The breath, as we saw earlier, is a powerful tool for both diagnosis and intervention. It can tell us that we’re in fight-or-flight mode. And a few moments of relaxed breathing may reduce the stress response. Indeed, attending to the breath (or to other sensations or body posture) can insert a pause into our unconscious forward movement, creating not only a moment of rest but a chance to pause and reassess. Pausing is one of the most important possibilities we can discover, for it can permit us to unhook, and thus to further cultivate a measure of control.
Pausing, Stopping, Resting
It can be quite painful to discover how hooked we’ve become to our digital lives. And for those of us who have previously noticed it, it can be painful to observe it more closely. There are many reasons why we’re online for large stretches of time and find it difficult to unplug. Sometimes our work demands it of us. And to the extent that we’ve internalized the cultural message to be more “productive,” to go ever faster and operate ever more efficiently, we may find it hard to disconnect, even when we can—or should. (Some of my students give voice to this, taking productivity simply as a fact of life, not a condition to be investigated and perhaps questioned. “Productivity is a martial art that I have spent years crafting,” an undergraduate named Nick says proudly.)
Playtime and social interaction, of course, also exert their pull and hold us online, as much as does work. Often, taking a break from work means switching to other digital activities. And so our time online can appear to be a seamless web of activity, a mixture of work, play, and other activities not so easily classified. Emily puts it nicely when she says, “The hyperlinky world that we live in is remarkable and exciting, yet is really quite impossible because there are no start and finish lines anymore. I start reading something, and then click to read the added bonus information and click to watch a related video from there, and then am transported to completely unrelated videos, and I never make it back to the first piece—I haven’t read any one thing in its entirety—and feel exhausted and like I failed.”5
In a sense Emily is right: There are no more start and finish lines—although it might be better to say that the lines have been weakened rather than fully obliterated. The distinctions between the week and the weekend, between daytime and nighttime, between worktime and playtime are losing their force. But pausing and stopping are no less important in a world of seemingly endless online enticement and opportunity. Here it is worth remembering the Sabbath idea, which I mentioned in Chapter 8. As a Jewish institution, the Sabbath recognizes that we humans need to rest (the English word that corresponds to the Hebrew shabbat) as well as to work. Indeed, without adequate rest our work will often suffer. Thus do we need rest for the sake of our work. But the ancient understanding of the Sabbath, while acknowledging this fact, posits another, more radical reason for resting: for the sake of our humanity. The Sabbath, in this second conception, is a time to savor and appreciate our lives, to smell the flowers, literally and figuratively. We need time not just to do but to be.
Cultivating the ability to pause and to stop is a central concern in all the exercises. Sometimes, the pause is a momentary break in the flow of activity. We stop long enough to notice the emotion we’re experiencing, thus disrupting the automated reaction that otherwise would have taken place. And as we accumulate moments of pausing and noticing, we begin to see patterns of behavior that were largely invisible when we were caught up in the doing. At other times in the exercises, the pause or stop is more substantial. We forgo certain online behaviors for hours or days in order to see how particular devices and apps may have hooked us. And in addition to pausing and noticing in these ways, we take the time to reflect on what we’ve seen, stepping outside our online activities and looking back at them.
Pausing and stopping, it turns out, are crucial both instrumentally and noninstrumentally. Instrumentally, they help us see how to operate online in healthier and more effective ways. Not only is it generally unproductive to stay online when we’re distracted and tired, but our lack of physical mobility can create health problems that will further limit our productivity in the future. As Holly says, “I’m beginning to recognize internal triggers that signal for time out: stiff muscles, an awareness of jumping from one unrelated thought to another, feeling anxious and pressured to complete any given task.” Getting up, moving around, and stretching is good for business.
But pausing and stopping can also help us recover and strengthen the noninstrumental dimension of our lives. For in disrupting our constant doing, pausing and stopping may shift us from what the psychologists Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale call “driven mode” to “being mode.” Being mode, they say, “is characterized by a sense of freedom, freshness, and unfolding of experience in new ways. It is responsive to the richness and complexity of the unique patterns that each moment presents.” Whereas in driven mode, by contrast, “the multidimensional nature of experience is reduced primarily to a unidimensional analysis of its standing in relation to a goal state.”6 Here, for example, in his final reflection on the course, Henry notes the freedom, relaxation, and joy that he discovered during a Sabbath-like experience earlier in his life. The reading we had done in class on the idea of the Sabbath, he says,
made me think more carefully about the place and value of Sabbath in our life and culture, and to remember back to Denmark, when very few stores—grocery stores included—were open on Sunday. This small initial inconvenience quickly turned into a great source of pleasure for my friends and myself, as Sundays emerged as ideal days to stroll around exploring the city, watching others do the same. I began to think more about what it means to take a day completely off work, and to realize the differences between telling myself I will do no work on a Saturday, intending to do work and doing none, and doing even a little work (like checking email), and to realize the restorative nature of a full Sabbath. I began taking full days off (perhaps at least checking email), realizing the freedom and relaxation that can be felt with a simple refusal to do any work for a day (before the day even begins). I spent some of the days I did this relaxing, reading, running, and seeing friends, and quickly realized the joy that could come from taking a complete day off work.
Living Fast and Slow
When I first began studying calligraphy many years ago, it was as an explicit alternative to my digital pursuits. I felt the need to balance the heady, abstract work of computer science and artificial intelligence with the embodied, fluid gestures of a handcraft. As it turned out, my study of calligraphy served me well. It opened the door to more contemplative ways of being in the world. Although I first conceived of it as an escape from the Fast World, the big surprise was that calligraphy—and the other contemplative practices that followed, including meditation—also offered me guidance in living in the Fast World more artfully, in integrating Fast World and Slow World practices.
Another surprise was that my calligraphic studies offered me insights into what I will call the politics of craft. I was able to take up calligraphy in the 1970s because it had been revived three-quarters of a century earlier as part of the Arts and Crafts movement. This movement, which began in late-nineteenth-century England, aimed to recover the craft knowledge that had been lost during the previous century of industrialization. The broad popularity of handcrafts in the West today is largely the result of these efforts. (Even the term “arts and crafts” is a direct reference back to this movement.)
Yet few of us today realize that the movement was about more than creating beautiful things by hand: it was actually a political movement. Indeed, the craftwork undertaken by its members was intended as a direct response to, a reaction against, industrialization. They felt that the mechanization of society was dehumanizing people—at its worst turning people into machines. And they hoped to right this balance, bringing the hand and the body more fully back into daily life, and creating beautiful things.7
Any craft, of course, can be considered as a purely technical enterprise. Today you can take up calligraphy (or bookbinding, or spinning, or weaving) in exactly this way. The classes you take and the books you read on the subject will largely introduce you to the tools, materials, and techniques you need to create the beautiful things you aspire to make. In much the same spirit, you can explore how to improve your digital craft purely as a matter of technique. Indeed, the exercises in this book are largely constructed to further just this kind of exploration. But it is my hope that as you bring greater attention to your online life you also pay attention to the larger social and political context within which you are operating. In performing your digital craftwork, what values are you supporting and expressing?
For much of the digital era, it has been challenging to express public concerns about where our digital developments were taking us. And if you did, you were likely to be dismissed as a Luddite. (The term refers to an early-nineteenth-century movement that opposed the mechanization of the weaving industry in England. While the term today refers to someone who is considered to be antitechnology, the original Luddites weren’t against mechanization per se but rather were against some of its economic and social effects.) In recent times, however, I have sensed a shift, a growing willingness to look at the pluses and minuses of our digital lives. I sense that we as a culture may be preparing to enter into a broader and deeper conversation about the place of all things digital in our lives. It is my hope that the ideas—and yes, the techniques—in this book, can contribute to that conversation. This is the subject of my concluding chapter.