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.”

The public is invited to attend the 2011 Bertha May Bell Andrews Lecture at no cost. Part of an innovative series of activities at the college exploring ways to dial down the digital barrage and reconnect with the capacity for contemplation, the event is presented by the Multifaith Chaplaincy.

It is co-sponsored by Bates Information and Library Services, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the Learning Commons, the Communications Office, the Career Development Center and the Office of the President. For more information, please contact 207-786-8272.

Belsky’s talk, Present Tense: Being Here and Now in a Non-Stop World, will explore the disappearing opportunities for reflection and contemplation, which he refers to as “sacred space.” Such deep thought is often challenged by technology-induced opportunities and demands, leading to reactive and dependent behavior from both individuals and institutions.

“Despite the incredible power and potential of sacred spaces, they are quickly becoming extinct,” Belsky notes on the website, the99percent.com. “We are depriving ourselves of every opportunity for disconnection. And our imaginations suffer the consequences.”

Belsky believes that people and organizations succeed by making opportunities for creative, concentrated attention. During his Bates residency, he will help the college reaffirm its commitment to deep thinking and understand how “reactionary workflow” works against such commitments. He’ll also offer guidance in approaching technology deliberately and productively, and in working more creatively overall.

Belsky’s visit is the centerpiece of a bold initiative that the Multifaith Chaplaincy describes as a “Bates community experiment.”

“The idea is not that these technologies are bad, but simply that we need to be more mindful about how we relate to them,” says Emily Wright-Magoon, associate multifaith chaplain.

The day after the lecture, in an experience called UnDay: A Day to Unplug and Unwind, students, staff and faculty will pledge to experiment with refraining from the technology of their choice for one full day.

The following day, a campus conversation will be held to assess how it went and what came up. Additionally, throughout the week there will be opportunities for meditation, yoga, massage, mindful eating and discussion.

Belsky has spent his professional life in technology, social media and the creative industry. He is the author of the best-selling book Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio, 2010), and is the founder and CEO of Behance, a company that develops products and services for the creative industries. In 2010, he was included in Fast Company’s list of “100 Most Creative People in Business.”

Belsky is a frequent contributor on MSNBC, and has worked with such leading organizations as General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and Proctor & Gamble, as well as with the U.S. State Department and the CIA.

He attended Cornell University as an undergraduate and received his master’s in business administration from Harvard Business School.

The Andrews Lecture, a signature talk at Bates since 1975, is a memorial to Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and established the women’s physical education program at the college. Her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews of the Bates class of 1940, established the lectureship.

While Bates has offered a three-year option for 40 years, an undergraduate education is hard to speed up, says Hansen. “I think too much in our culture is about doing things faster and simpler and easier. And what we can’t let go of in higher education is that slower is actually better when it comes to learning.”

Hansen joined Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University;  Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University; Robert Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a new book on education reform; and Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and former assistant secretary of education under Lamar Alexander. View story from Newsweek, Oct. 26, 2009.

Stephanie Kelley-Romano

While doing graduate work at the University of Kansas in the 1990s, Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano got hooked on The X-Files, so much so that the TV show’s organizing myth, a belief in alien abduction, gave Kelley-Romano her dissertation topic.

Published in 2006, “Mythmaking in Alien Abduction Narratives” drew from her 130 interviews with people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens. Collectively, she says, the stories represent an evolving myth similar to a religion.

What intrigued you about alien abduction stories?

I’ve always been interested in rhetoric around sudden and dramatic changes. How do you wake up one day and think you’ve been abducted by aliens? Or how do you wake up and think the Lord Jesus Christ has saved you?

Read more of the Stephanie Kelley-Romano interview.

Was it hard to find people who believe they’ve been abducted?

They are everywhere. A 1992 Roper poll suggested that 3.7 million Americans believe they’ve been abducted. Several Bates people have come by for my card because they have a relative who thinks they’ve been abducted.

So how is someone’s belief that they’ve been abducted like a religion?

In the narratives, you see people using their experience like a religion: for self-guidance on how to live or to achieve a sense of unity and transcendence. For example, if a person talks about being abducted because of their intelligence, that gives a sense of empowerment. Or if the narrative talks about extraterrestrials visiting Earth to help integrate humanity into the larger cosmic community, that puts the myth into the realm of religious communion.

You also argue that abduction narratives reflect fears about race and technology.

In many narratives, aliens that are gray — the mixture of black and white — occupy a lower status than aliens typically described as having nearly Nordic features. The gray aliens are often on Earth to start a hybrid race that can’t survive without nurturing from humans, because the aliens are overly reliant on technology and can’t nurture life. Alien narratives allow nonbelievers to talk about these issues too — isn’t it interesting that the top-grossing films of all time have to do with aliens or extraterrestrials?

What is your teaching approach?

Back at Kansas, I lectured, telling them a lot of things. Now I don’t lecture so much. In upper-level courses especially, I bring it to them: “What do you think?” While I believe that alien abduction is very much like a religion, I do not want to convince 15 students of that.
I want them to convince me otherwise.

But have we lost something when professors don’t lecture as often?

Definitely. I’m all for collaborative learning, but that combined with cultural relativism can be a train wreck. The bottom line is that I know a lot more about rhetoric than my students do. It’s my obligation to tell some of what I know in a way that models competence and excitement.

The study of rhetoric delves into political and social criticism — hot topics. How do you maintain a sense of fair play in the classroom?

In my classes, you can claim anything you want and if you can prove it, you will do well. If you can’t, you won’t. Some students get freaked out by that. They say, “Well, I feel that….” And I say, “I don’t care much about what you feel. I care what you can prove.” So even though I’m a hippy-dippy liberal feminist who researches alien abduction, I tend to have a conservative following. Conservative students know that in my classes, regardless of the topic, they are absolutely, positively safe.

You also bring students into your research.

After Victoria Westgate ’06 wrote her senior thesis on political cartoons and Hurricane Katrina, she and I co-authored “Drawing Disaster” in The Texas Speech Communication Journal and “Blaming Bush” in Journalism Studies. Nate Kellogg ’09 and I are writing on the Duke lacrosse case and the coverage in the school newspaper, The Chronicle.

Read any good books?

Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, a study that includes captivity narratives. Everything from slave narratives to alien abduction narratives can be looked at through a similar rhetorical lens.

What’s compelling about the current presidential primary season?

I get excited about having 18-year-old students who don’t yet understand the symbolic functions of conventions or presidential speeches. They think the inaugural address is stupid. Some of this is due to the self-reflexity of shows like The Daily Show, which have exposed the deliberateness of political campaigns and the presidency. So our little happy myth that presidents run because they’re called has been shattered, and the office secularized and debased. What steps in to fill that void is another myth: That we are somehow smarter than people were 20 years ago. And I don’t think that’s true.

]]> http://www.bates.edu/news/2008/05/11/ask-me-another-2/feed/ 0 http://www.bates.edu/news/1998/01/18/classics-meet-technology/ http://www.bates.edu/news/1998/01/18/classics-meet-technology/#comments Sun, 18 Jan 1998 17:21:20 +0000 Bates News http://home.bates.edu/?p=21114 In response to the growing presence of classical culture on the World Wide Web, the classical and medieval studies program at Bates presents a series of lectures and workshops given by leaders in the field to demonstrate how new technology can democratize this specialized area of scholarship.

Interested members of the community are invited to attend lectures and workshops free of charge, but should sign up in advance for workshops, which are limited to 30 participants each.

The first of the lectures will be given at 7 p.m. Feb. 4  in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall. Suzanne Bonefas of Associated Colleges of the South discusses Building On-Line Communities of Classicists and follows with a workshop on the same subject from 2 to 4 p.m. Feb. 5  in Room 208 of Hathorn Hall.

The workshop will focus on Web sites developed by Bonefas, including Diotima, a collection of texts and images for the study of women in the ancient world, and VRoma, a similar collection for teaching Roman culture and Latin.