Dear www.baby.geek.nz
You are a dear wee website. You have given me a place to file my thoughts and preserve a gigantic number of links (* or portals to wonderlands of learning and discovery, as I like to think of them).
You’re a bit of a secret, though, which is cool, but there is this thing I love to imagine you doing. Just quietly. I love to imagine that you, www.baby.geek.nz, have improbably become a useful launchpad, catapaulting conversations between thinking parents and scattering chat among other assorted family-folk.
In a world gone bonkers, only you manage to somehow bring together a pot pourri of links that is JUST SO MY CUP OF TEA. Which shouldn’t surprise me, because I posted every darned last one of them. Beginning with THIS, my very first blog post. Awww, cute.
I do love you, darling website, and I promise I can change. Please, baby(geek), just give me a little more time. I dream of a bright future for us,
love,
Me xx
End scene.
Anyway, I’m obsessing more than usual about these notions of communication and internet and purpose because last week I went to a Social Media 101 training day. Holla, Enterprise North Canterbury! Tumeke, Simplify & Amplify!
It’s all very fascinating, and I kinda dig learning about the psychology of marketing, and why people do stuff and how to get them to do the stuff you think they oughta, I am horrified by what my dear late mother would’ve called the Coca-colonisation of the world. The blatant and aggressive enslavement of populations by corporations too slick and sneaky to be outfoxed. Really, I think we should all buy less. Use less. Do more for ourselves.
And the whole technology of twitter and facebook and all their chums is flippin amazing. As a tool, it’s the way to find all the peoples who care about the things. Nana over here has to do some work … cos I’d love to find some thinking mamas and I think that’s where they are and yet I FEAR the lure of the devices. Both for myself and for all of us!
Pads and Macs and smart phones and regular (dumb?) phones … OH … behold these amazing ads from China about resisting the phone addiction FOR THE CHILDREN …
… here’s the thing …. I’d love it if we could all get the fact that societies of useful adults – that is, adults who are kind, competent, smart, healthy, capable, or at least not incompetent dicks – those sorts of adults are more likely if they were gifted responsive, warm, calm, loving care while they were babies. There. It’s that simple. I said it.
Not just me. Heaps of people. Like Harvard’s Center for the Developing Child. Heaps.
And you cannot tell me, not even for a second, that the brains of human young will be as effectively nurtured by distracted adults whose faces glow from their device du jour than they will be by an adult available to meet their gaze, respond to their vocalisations, and make up lame songs.
Ladies and gentlegeeks, I think we gotta unplug more. For ourselves, and sure as the dickens for our babies.
I mean, I’m all for the flow of mindfulness teaching, (at school! Love it.) I am generally very Mindful of Mindfulness, but I can’t help but think we wouldn’t need quite so much mindfulness training if we just spent a wee bit less time skittering between devices and leaping between operating systems.
It’s like how we eat tons of fatty food and then obsess about weight loss. I’m talking about us as a culture, not YOU. Or ME. Just all of us, you know? Truly: if we did like Michael Pollan … “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” and then went for walks and did some yoga then VOILA! Wellness.
Sorry. I’m a bit didactic and grouchy tonight. I’m angsting.
Yeah, I angst about encouraging folks deeper into the digital world and further from the juicy messy deliciousness of real life. And yet I love the handiness of a magical box that sings the commercials of my youth and finds me amazing recipes and connects me to people I love, all over the world.
What the flip. Modern life … I need me my online yoga before bed. Love you, Adriene, my electronic friend!
Irony, she lives.