The Screen and the Self: Screen-Free Week

In last week’s post, I mentioned MIT Professor Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. I was so inspired and intrigued by an interview with her (http://www.fastcocreate.com/1679046/alone-together-an-mit-professors-new...) that I bought the book and started reading it the same day it arrived.

Turkle outlines profound changes in the individual and in society, as a result of the influence of technology in our lives. We can probably all agree that many of the new technologies allow us to stay more connected and get some of our work done more quickly. But, as Turkle points out, we are letting technology define who we are, through media like Facebook and Twitter as well as online worlds like Second Life, and we are witnessing the coming of age of a generation that has never lived without computer-mediated communication. Human interaction can be time-consuming and sometimes messy, so we rely on short texts and quick emails, boiling everything down, so that we can get the message across and keep moving. This is leading us, indeed, to expect more from our machines and less from each other, since the machines are less complicated.

This line of inquiry got me thinking about Miss Representation, a film we screened last month at Green Meadow Waldorf School. This excellent documentary looks at media representations of women and women’s under-representation in positions of power and influence in the US. In the same way that we expect more from technology and less from each other, we also accept images from the media more readily than images from our own lives. Most people we see don’t look like the people on television or in the movies. Yet most people feel inadequate in the face of these constant images of perfection, and work hard to have the perfect body, perfect teeth, the perfect home, and the perfect vacation. If we spent a fraction of the time that we spend buying health and beauty products or planning kitchen renovations connecting with our families, or volunteering, or taking real care of ourselves, imagine what our communities and our lives would look like.

When we give our lives over to screens, we give away the power of real life (seeing and appreciating things as they are) and the power of imagination (seeing things as we ourselves imagine they could be). We trade our picture of what is and what could be for someone else’s, and then we frantically chase that borrowed vision: we should be thinner, sexier, wittier, wealthier, more accomplished.

So I urge you once again to join me in celebrating Screen-Free Week, from April 30-May 6. Turn off the media for a few days, and see what your world actually looks like. Think about how you’d like it to look. Then take steps to make the two pictures align. In doing so, you will be empowering yourself (and those you are close to) to reclaim three-dimensional, unmediated, here-and-now life.

*Green Meadow Waldorf School, where I work, will be kicking off National Screen-Free Week (which runs from April 30-May 6) with an event on Saturday, April 28 from 2-4pm. Join us! Details at www.gmws.org.*