Andrews lecturer Scott Belsky, left, speaks with audience members after his talk, including, Alexey Bobko '13, of Minsk, Belarus.

There are tragedies, and then there are tragedies.

Earthquake, tsunami and uncontained nuclear radiation in Japan.

Tornadoes ravaging the American heartland.

Losing your iPhone — wait, what?

Yes, this too is a tragedy. Or so said 41 percent of Stanford University students polled in a 2010 survey on smartphone use.

That statistic came out during a Nov. 8 address by Scott Belsky, an expert on technology and creative work who helped Bates kick off a campus-wide experiment in going unplugged.

With our time and consciousness increasingly ruled by electronic media, the Nov. 8-15 initiative Present Tense: Being Here and Now in a Nonstop World encourages a break from the little screen and a re-engagement with the spiritual self.

Belsky, in the college’s annual Bertha May Bell Andrews Lecture, described the psychic toll taken by constant connectivity — and offered a few suggestions for reclaiming inner peace.

Scott Belsky discusses the importance of reflective thought amidst the information onslaught in the annual Andrews Lecture on Nov. 8.

Multifaith Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace welcomed about 100 people to the Bates Chapel for the event. Among them were Cindy Andrews ’74 and Kristy Andrews ’12, members of a family whose long Bates lineage includes Dr. Carl Andrews ’40, who established the Andrews Lecture to honor his mother in 1975.

Belsky is the author of the national best-seller Making Ideas Happen, and is founder and CEO of Behance, a company that develops products and services for the creative industries. As someone whose work straddles the realms of high-tech and inner inspiration, he also has, he admitted, his own struggles with the tempting distractions of constant connectivity.

Belsky based his talk on the concept of “sacred space” — the conditions that are conducive to deep and reflective thought. Without such contemplation, he said, it’s difficult to bring good ideas to fruition, and easy to lose sight of what’s most important to us.

“We’re obsessed with the present tense,” he said, alluding to the Bates initiative. “We want real-time information. The past tense is old news, the future is dreaming, but the present tense is real.”

Constant connectivity “threatens both your quality of life and your ability to make an impact on what matters most to you,” Belsky said. We cease to be present in our own lives. Instead, we’re “just hacking away at the collective inboxes all around us, just trying to stay afloat.

“In some ways we are living someone else’s to-do list.”

He said, “In our professional lives, I call this the era of reactionary workflow. In our personal lives, it’s reactionary living. . . .With endless streams of information always flowing in, we have become increasingly reactive . . . rather than being proactive with what matters most to us.”

One of Belsky’s most compelling concepts was “insecurity work” — the compulsive checking of e-mail, feeds, texts, tweets, posts and other e-stimuli in a futile effort to assure ourselves, as he put it, that everything is OK.

“We want to know that our family and friends are there for us,” that our jobs still need us, that our stocks haven’t tanked and the world hasn’t ended while we were checking Facebook.

But through this constant vigilance, he said, “we are losing interest in ourselves,” he said.
At the same time, we’re increasingly ignoring life’s serendipitous gifts of surprise, accident and coincidence. “As we become more connected and wedded to our devices, we become less open to circumstance. Quite simply, we stop noticing what’s going on around us.”

Belsky noted that he met his wife because of a chance meeting between their mothers, strangers until then, who chatted in a nail salon while their nails dried. “I have to wonder,” he said, “if these two women had had their smartphones and their iPads, would they have even started talking?”

“I encourage you to value the circumstantial, recognize how powerful it is and then mine the circumstantial more intentionally.”

Belsky’s key prescription for his audience was to build into the daily routine opportunities for deep thinking and for focus on true priorities. “Create windows of non-stimulation during your day and life, whether they are habits or rituals or both.”

In that spirit, a group of Jewish artists launched a project called the Sabbath Manifesto, through which they (as their website explains) have “adapted our ancestors’ rituals by carving out one day per week to unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors and get with loved ones.”

In 2010 the group declared a National Day of Unplugging, and issued an Unplug Challenge, wherein celebrities disconnected themselves from the e-hive mind for 24 hours. Participants included actor Josh Radnor.

“The 21st century challenge is to keep your focus, and preserve the sanctity of mind that is required to create, and ultimately make an impact on what matters most. Imagination happens when your mind has the freedom to run rampant,” Belsky said.

Belsky also advised his listeners to “recognize the insecurity work that you do and compartmentalize it”; and to learn to rely on their own mental resources. “Nothing should resonate more than your own intuition.”

“It’s all really difficult to do,” he concluded. “But we’re all part of the future, so we really need to figure this out.”

In the years to come, he said, “I believe that focus and the ability to be present will be the greatest competitive advantage for success professionally, and certainly personally.”

Titled Antisocial Media: Understanding Racism and Homophobia in a Digitally Connected World, Nakamura’s lecture was to be part of the series Race in a Post-Human World, sponsored by the Bates Lectures Committee. The committee hopes to reschedule Nakamura. The series will include two other lectures in 2011 and a dance performance, all of which will be open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact this jgovinda@bates.edu.

As part of a Bates College series exploring the impacts of social and technological progress on concepts of race, author Lisa Nakamura offers a lecture at 7:15 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 2, in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52), 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Nakamura’s lecture, titled Antisocial Media: Understanding Racism and Homophobia in a Digitally Connected World, will address social media’s influence on concepts of race and homosexuality, and will touch on the recent suicide of Rutgers first-year Tyler Clementi.

The talk is the first public offering in the series Race in a Post-Human World, which explores the collapse of social categories caused by advances in technology. Sponsored by the Bates College Lectures Committee, the series will include two more lectures and a dance performance, all of which will be open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact jgovinda@bates.edu.

Post-humanism is a term expressing what many believe is our current condition as human beings. Thanks to technological advances — such as medical interventions like smart prosthetics and implanted defibrillators, and human-emulating capabilities such as artificial intelligence — the old boundaries between animal and machine are increasingly blurred.

Similarly, post-humanism challenges long-held notions of other categorizations of humanity such as gender, race and species — making post-humanism a concept that is highly controversial, but extremely idea-rich across a wide range of academic disciplines.

Nakamura is the director of the Asian American Studies Program and Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has published numerous books including Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002).

The series continues in 2011 with the lecture Ring, Ring, Ring: Popular Music and Mobile Technologies by Alexander Weheliye, associate professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern University, at 7:15 p.m. Monday, Feb. 14, also in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom.

Weheliye teaches courses in African American and African diaspora literature and culture, critical theory and popular culture. He is the author of the book Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke University Press, 2005).

Alondra Nelson, associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, offers the lecture Roots Revelations: Genetic Ancestry Tracing and the YouTube Generation at 7:15 p.m. Thursday, March 3, again in the Keck Classroom.

Nelson specializes in race and ethnicity in the U.S.; gender and kinship; sociohistorical studies of medicine, science and technology; and social and cultural theory.

Race in a Post-Human World concludes with a performance by acting director and assistant professor of dance at Bates, Rachel Boggia. Her performance, In the Very Eye of the Night, takes place in May (date TBA) and is conceived and directed by Marlon Barrios Solano, a Venezuelan dance and new media artist, teacher and researcher.

Boggia, who has been on faculty at Wesleyan University, Dickinson College and Ohio State University, specializes in multidisciplinary collaboration with scientists, dance documentaries and multi-media performance.

Danforth’s talk, titled The Hedonometer: A Remote Sensor of Global Happiness, is open to the public at no cost. It is sponsored by the departments of mathematics, psychology and economics, and the Division of Social Sciences.

Danforth, an assistant professor in the UVM department of mathematics and statistics, and department colleague Peter Dodds have created a system for measuring the national mood by compiling expressions of happiness or displeasure collected from Web texts.

According to this research, Election Day 2008 was the happiest day for Americans in the past four years. The day Michael Jackson died was the unhappiest.

Danforth and Dodds began their work at the Web site www.wefeelfine.org, which searches more than two million blogs for sentences beginning with “I feel” or “I am feeling.” They then applied to their search results a standard psychological methodology for associating particular words with degrees of happiness.

They argue that blogs are an adequate indicator of happiness among the overall U.S. population because they are written from all over the country and bloggers are racially diverse and almost evenly split between genders. (More recently, the pair have applied their methodology to Twitter updates and song lyrics.) They hope their insight into how the population feels will improve public policymaking and the understanding of social phenomena.

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