And of course, by the time I suffered through that initial interruption, which was full of seemingly pressing questions that apparently needed to be answered immediately before I could even get onto my blog site, I was in great danger of forgetting what I had gotten onto the blog site to say in the first place.
Perfect. And exactly what the workshop was all about.
We are absolutely inundated with choices. Most of them technological. Most promising to make our lives easier or to make our work go faster or to make us cooler or smarter or more attractive. Most sounding downright irresistible, now that we know so much about how to market things to one another. So we scurry from choice to choice, trying to make the "right" one, trying to keep up, trying to do what everyone else is doing, leaking little bits of our own unique creative individuality all the time.
Soul making takes some peace and quiet. Some continuity. I had an entire chain of thought going about that workshop which will never quite exist again. Because it was booted out, rooted out -- almost entirely expunged -- by another set of ideas that popped up in front of it. Did you ever read Watership Down? (Great book.) At one point the rabbits are trying to get a big old dog to go in a certain direction, so one rabbit pops up in front of the dog, which it chases, and then another rabbit pops up in front of the dog, which it chases, and then another rabbit pops up in front of the dog, which it chases...
...that is our minds, folks. In the USA, circa 2000s. We run hard, but we are easily distracted as to direction.
50 years ago children read Treasure Island or Tom Sawyer or Huckeberry Finn. Today, many children have to struggle to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. There are so many forms of communication and entertainment available to us we can't bear to limit ourselves or our children to only doing one thing at a time. But we know from brain scan studies that multi-tasking prevents deep understanding in any of the tasks involved. (Or, there seem to be a lot more channels available today than we actually have the bandwidth to handle. See What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr.)
We can't keep technology from effecting our souls. That's where we are. That's what's happening today. But we can, as Slater suggests, try and make its impact on our souls more conscious. We can make more of an effort to choose what will serve us and to reject what will not. We can start to realize that the "hive mind" produced by cyberspace is not unbiased after all, it's actually extremely biased, and not towards wisdom, either -- it's biased towards selling products.
We can start to realize we don't have to chase every new rabbit that pops up.
Also recommended by Slater:
You Are Not A Gadget, Jaron Lanier
Enough, Bill McKibben
Alone Together, Sherry Turkle
