Mitra Martin Incubator #103 | Smartphones
Sidestepping smartphone anxiety, reclaiming attention and creativity
The Mitra Martin Incubator is a newsletter dedicated to world-building and cultivation, helping the seeds of the future (work, education, parenting, and housing) be seen and grow.
Hi everyone and welcome if you’re new to my newsletter! I just discovered that I recently published my 100th piece here, thank you for being part of my journey. Today I’m trying out a new format with a few new sections:
Include & discern: A short thought piece to intended to encourage mind-widening
Your sacred attention: Ideas and practices to help heal our attention
The tech-conscious family: For parents seeking to establish healthy tech habits
Plus, I’ve got a couple more whimsical/random inspirations at the end for you. I’d love to hear what this newsletter sparks for you. Please hit reply to let me know. Best, Mitra
Include & discern
In the wake of his new book, I see in Jonathan Haidt a frightened father and an outraged citizen. He has started a big, loud conversation that has to be had, as ham-handed as his proposed solutions may be.
In a thoughtful response to Haidt, Michelle Ciulla Lipkin represents the perspective of media literacy educators who have dedicated their lives to approaches to mindful integration of digital technologies. I appreciate her nuanced, grounded perspective.
I believe we all need social device literacy education. We all need some sane and healthy screentime limits. We all need more enriching and magnetic smartphone alternatives. And, we all need each other to help forge these.
Most of all, I believe we need shared spaces that invite us to look inward, to hold subtler conversations about our smartphone use, and to learn about one anothers’ tech fears and life-dreams. Building a world that creates such space has been the subject of my research and book project for the past 4 years; every morning it brings me to work with renewed urgency.
Your sacred attention
Provocation: What if you leave your smartphone at home when you go for a walk?
Leaving your smartphone at home means letting go of your GPS, step counter, notes app, podcast, music player — and just being alone outdoors with yourself.
I’ve done this for a whole week and I’m stunned to discover how much more peaceful and restorative the experience is. I return happier, lighter, and more inspired.
Thank you to my friend and attention researcher Avik Basu for this research-backed idea. Pro tip: Take a pad and pen along to capture all the ideas you have!
The tech-conscious family
Activity: Let your 4-7 year old child create a photo album using your airplane-mode phone.
Phones have potential to enable creativity if they are introduced with that context. What if we invite kids from the beginning to use their phones as art tools?
Here’s a 1-hour long activity my nieces enjoyed: A garden tour of our neighborhood. They took pictures of anything they thought was interesting. At home, they selected the photos they liked best, and made an album to share with their parents. I wonder how I could enrich this project from a media literacy POV - ideas welcome!
This month’s inspirations…
Here are a couple of inspirations I’m metabolizing:
Jacob Collier’s Djesse Volume 4 Tour. Wow, this show is all the things: joyous, tender, profound, wholesome, sophisticated, wild, funny, involving. Someday I’ll find a way to articulate the indelible impact that this artist has on my life during this pivotal year, but for now I’ll just say, catch his tour!
Nathan Heller’s New Yorker piece The Battle for Attention. Oooh, so much to dig into here, like the Order of the Third Bird, the Friends of Attention, and ESTAR(SER). My favorite discovery so far is the Twelve Theses on Attention. Here is an excerpt:
True attention takes the unlivable and makes it livable. It is a lung that replenishes the air it breathes. If suddenly you feel that you can live and breathe in the place where you are, you or someone around you has committed, enacted, or bestowed attention. This is our work.
I appreciate your attention, every time. Next time, I plan to share some of discoveries and ideas on the topic of housing and innovations in social residential living.