Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

an abundance of exclamation

March 4th, 2019    -    6 Comments

When my daughter was in seventh grade, I became alarmed at her overuse of an addictive stimulant: the exclamation point. And not just one, but a scattershot of exclamation points exploding across her texts, emails and essays. I felt like asking the language arts teacher when she would start teaching language. But I didn’t. The teacher didn’t need a critic; she needed a volunteer. So I offered to teach descriptive writing to the class.

My goal was to convince the 12-year-olds that they had a vast vocabulary of words to express feelings without overpunctuating a sentence. At our first lesson, I asked the kids to tell me different words that meant “happy.” Then I asked for words that meant “sad.” Emboldened, I went for the gold, asking if anyone knew a word that described a mix of happy and sad. One brave girl volunteered.

“Bipolar?” she said.

It was bittersweet.

I didn’t ask how she knew a word from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I didn’t want to know. She might have learned all about it on Instagram. But I worried just the same.

Not long ago I was talking to the mother of an incoming kindergartener who was anxious about her child’s readiness. Pre-K prepares a child for kindergarten, I said, kindergarten prepares for first grade, first grade prepares for second grade, and so on. Middle school is really about preparing for high school and high school is all about college. It’s a refrain you hear every year at Back-to-School Night, and I guess it makes us feel that our kids are getting somewhere. But where, exactly? More to the point, at what price to our children? We can probably answer for them, because we already know what it feels like to spend our whole lives anxiously trying to get somewhere else.

A local high school junior disappeared after being dropped off one Saturday morning at an SAT testing site. It wasn’t the first time she’d taken the SAT, her frantic parents told reporters. She’d taken it many times in order to keep improving her score before applying to colleges. This wasn’t like her, no, she was a straight A+ student in the running for valedictorian at an extremely competitive high school! But in the end she skipped out and took the train to San Francisco instead of filling out the bubble sheet one more time. She sounded like a very smart girl.

Before senior year my daughter went away for a month as part of a pre-college summer program. She was excited and so was I. This was going to be a blast! You can bet that when a university brings a couple hundred footloose 17-year-olds to campus there is a lot of communication involved. In the last email from the college before arrival, there was a packing list, a move-in schedule, and a list of emergency contacts. What I wasn’t prepared for was this highlighted reminder: Make sure that you have taken all necessary steps to secure the mental health resources your student may need while they are here.

So this is where we are. I don’t have words, but I’ve been saving up a primal scream of exclamation points. Is anyone listening? We have to do better than this!!!!!

so much magnificence

August 27th, 2015    -    6 Comments

1

It was the day before Austria found 50 bodies in a truck on the side of the road. The day after the young Roanoke reporters were murdered on TV so the shooter could post it on Facebook and Twitter. And three days after my daughter woke up for her first day of a new school year.

“I dreamed Donald Trump bombed our school because we have gay students.”

Do you know anything about Donald Trump? I asked her.

I just know that he is stupid.

This is our world. The virulent, ignorant, unimaginable evil of it, screaming past us every day.

***

A few years ago, at the end of a summer yoga class, lying vanquished in the death pose, I heard a song come through the speaker. A single voice sung a four-line lyric (well, three) to an acoustic guitar, and then swelled into a two-part harmony.

There is so much magnificence
Near the ocean
Waves are coming in
Waves are coming in

It was so plain! Repeating and repeating without ever going anywhere. But I was mesmerized. Eight minutes of a song with no beginning, middle, or end, and I didn’t want it to be over, didn’t want to silence the strange and awesome power of the simplest tune I’d ever heard.

It was sung by a guy named Steve Gold. I bought the song and never got tired of it. Sometime it’s the perfect time for it.

Maybe this is what we mean by magnificence. The pristine beauty of things bigger than us and simpler than us and yet so near to us, coming in, coming in, coming in, to the sand we’re standing on.

I can’t do anything about anything, but I can share the magnificence. Let this be enough for now.

face time

February 28th, 2013    -    11 Comments

blog-wilted-house-plantNext time you want to grow a plant, set it in front of a screensaver of the sun and see what happens.

Excuse me for pointing out the obvious. The sun is not a picture of the sun. An internet connection is not the same as a living connection. Life is not a picture of life. It is the transmission of living energy and not the transmission of digital data.

Or as an old Zen fogey said in far fewer words, “A rice cake is not a picture of a rice cake.” Which one will satisfy your hunger?

There were a couple of events that brought this to mind this week. One was the decision by the CEO of Yahoo to suspend the struggling company’s work-from-home policy. The stated reason turned out to be controversial: people who work together benefit from actual face time. And I do mean “face time,” not the phone app FaceTime for video chats, another example of a digital surrogacy that has brought living proximity to near-extinction. When I read the arguments against the new (old) policy on my computer, I said to my husband, “That CEO is right.”

He sat at his desk looking into his own computer and said, “Yes she is.” This spoken exchange is called “having a conversation.” From time to time we sit in the same room and speak to one another. Granted, not often, but stringing together these occasional proximities is what used to be called “a relationship.” He travels quite a bit in his job to have one-day meetings with his co-workers around the world because it makes quicker work of their complicated labor. Something happens in the space between living things—something visible as well as invisible. Something shared: a force, a bond; the circulation of energy, thoughts, feelings, sound, motion. Get it?

Few do. Not long ago I heard a young couple talking about their communication style. The fellow preferred texting; he said phone calls were inefficient and exasperating because “talking wastes time” when data can be conveyed instantly. I smiled and had a sense of where that non-conversation would be taking them in the next few years.

We all know better, really we do. That’s why we call that kind of disengagement “phoning it in.” I know doing things in person isn’t always convenient, but do we really have to argue the merits? I guess we do.

Last weekend at a beginner’s meditation retreat I was asked how many students I have. “That’s a good question,” I responded. “Lots of people ask me if I’ll teach them online, but I don’t do that.” It’s wonderfully clarifying for me that I practice in a line of teachers who have carried the living Dharma down from antiquity as an oral tradition. Teachers and students practice in living proximity: in the same room, two people sitting together having conversation, sharing sound, motion, breath. Get it?

Few do. Just about anything that looks like what we do in a meditation hall can now be done online via email, downloads, Skype, discussion boards, even meditation apps. Do it in your own home (where you won’t do it)! As an e-course! I don’t get it. This is not the Dharma I practice. Not the Dharma I teach. Whether you can see it or not, something happens in the space between us. Something intimate, wise, and generous. Something real.

You have to experience the light and warmth of the sun to stay alive.

This fascinating video called “Finding the Visible in the Invisible” will give you a look at the face time I’m talking about. But don’t mistake the video for the magic of real life. The video may pique your interest but it will not satisfy your hunger.

encryption for a new society

April 22nd, 2012    -    12 Comments

friend: no one you know
community: no place you live
connect: disconnect
interact: isolate
engage: distract
like: click
click: touch
touch: screen
screen: reality
stream: data
streaming: live data
live: not living
comment: type
chat: read
follow: ignore
social: alone

Last week my landline rang. You have to be of a certain age to even have a landline. I almost never pick it up. But I saw the name on ID. It was a friend—someone I’ve seen in my small town every week for 15 years. We have a sentimental history but don’t talk much anymore. Seeing her name I thought the worst.

That’s how it is these days. The phone rings and you think the worst.

She was calling to ask me to have lunch with her. For no reason. Just lunch. An hour sitting face-to-face, chatting. The whole event was such a shock that it made me realize how far we’ve drifted from what words used to mean: words like friend, face, and chat.

We have a new society, and it has corrupted the vocabulary of the old.  A society that isn’t social, with a language that is completely silent. I write this here so that one day the archeologists will be able to decode the encryption, and imagine what it used to mean to be alive.

This is why I will never stop inviting you to meet me face-to-face, and why one day you will.

The Art of Non-Parenting, Central School, Belmont, CA May 31.

Beginner’s Mind One-Day Meditation Retreat, Los Angeles, June 10.

things I learned on twitter

October 22nd, 2010    -    7 Comments

1. Everyone seems to be selling something.
2. No one seems to be buying anything.
3. It’s easy for anybody to be quoted. And I mean your average ordinary nobody.
4. Mistaking quotations for wisdom is like mistaking fruitcake for dessert.
5. Twitter seems awfully noisy until you realize that what you hear is nothing at all.
6. A lot of tweets read like air kisses.
7. If you think air kissing is like kissing, you might like fruitcake for dessert.
8. Here, take my fruitcake. _/|\_
9. You can have stacks of fruitcake and you still don’t have anything to eat.
10. Personally speaking, no one seems to be as interested in what I have to say as I am.
11. Tweet this: Things I Learned on Twitter http://bit.ly/d9rbGF
12. RT this: RT @kmaezenmiller Things I Learned on Twitter http://bit.ly/d9rbGF
13. Quote me. – Karen Maezen Miller

If you liked this, you might like: Things I Learned on Facebook.

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death by twitter

August 2nd, 2010    -    1 Comment

“Facebook is like a nosebleed. Twitter is like breathing into a paper bag.” Read more poetic license about our social ills in my first blog post at Smartly LA, a writers collective for “people who get it,” in which I confess how very much I still don’t get social media. “Like pointing to a Twinkie as the defense for murder.” Go there and tell the good doctor how you feel when you’re on a steady diet of social media. Oh, and follow me.

***

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