The Mindful Use of Technology
There are a number of resources and initiatives today that are exploring the relationship between the contemplative dimension of life and the digital world.
In The Digital Distraction, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang calls his approach to the blending of the digital and the contemplative “contemplative computing.” The opening chapter of Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: How to Thrive Online is devoted to attention and distraction. “Are you captain or captive of your attention muscles?” Rheingold asks. Rafael Calvo and Dorian Peters include a chapter on mindfulness in their book, Positive Computing. And in his book Wisdom 2.0, Soren Gordhamer recounts his own struggles with digital “addiction”—how he came to acknowledge “the lack and incompleteness when I was not on my computer or my cell”—and his subsequent embrace of contemplative practices as an antidote.1
We are also beginning to see training programs, conferences, and digital apps that explore this territory. Google’s internal training program, “Search Inside Yourself,” has received considerable attention for introducing mindfulness to one of Silicon Valley’s corporate powerhouses. Chade-Meng Tan, the originator of the program, has written a book, Search Inside Yourself, and has also spun off an independent corporate training program, the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. Soren Gordhamer, author of Wisdom 2.0, has also founded a conference series with the same name. Meetings, which feature both technologists and contemplatives as speakers, are held in the United States and abroad. And there are a growing number of smart phone apps that promote meditation and mindfulness.2