My purpose: For all mission-driven, social justice-oriented people and organizations to have the confidence and skills to learn, use and love data & technology as part of achieving their missions.
The Slow Technology Movement
|
On a bit of a whim but also on a kind of dream, I bought a new domain name this past week: slowtechmovement.com. I’ve been considering the concept of Time a lot lately. The language we have around Time is so interesting. We save, spend, and buy time, commoditizing it. We lose, waste, and gain time, measuring and judging it. We stretch time, anthropomorphizing it. We always have the same amount of time available to us, and yet we search for more of it. For people doing social justice work or social profit work (#socialprofit is the re-name of non-profit), the relationship with time will always be complicated. There is a justifiable and moral urgency to achieve our missions as soon as possible, benefiting the people we are serving right now. At the same time, neither individual behaviors nor systemic change happens quickly. This is not a paradox to solve – it is one to vent about. If you or someone you know would dig a conversation about this topic, please consider joining the discussion on Friday, Jan 24th at 1pm EST. When we throw technology at our time, it can be a kind of knee-jerk reaction to try to use technology to “save” time, or at least re-direct it. The technology can do certain things so much faster than we mere humans, and with automations the incentives to “set and forget” pre-defined processes are plentiful. But as the Slow Food and Slow Cities movements have shown, we can make deliberate choices about what parts of life we do not want to speed up or automate. In particular for social justice work, we should be making deliberate decisions about how we consider time when it comes to relationship building, establishing trust, and fostering community (among other things). And as part of this consideration, we should also be examining our use of technology - not necessarily to “save” time or speed things up, but to be a tool that supports our work in the time that it takes. This is part of the manifesto for the Slow Technology Movement. Connecting with people takes time and it is well worth it - that is no surprise to anyone. One of my favorite technologies supporting this kind of connection is The Nonprofit Hive. Go get yourself a conversation with another social profit person on an upcoming Thursday. Founder Tasha Van Vlack graciously allowed me to expand on some ideas about the Slow Technology Movement in a blog post for The Hive. Please give it a read and reply here to let me know what thoughts it kicks up for you, and if you’d be up for talking more about it with me. Peace, Emily |
Emily Hicks-Rotella
My purpose: For all mission-driven, social justice-oriented people and organizations to have the confidence and skills to learn, use and love data & technology as part of achieving their missions.
There are many people who have given voice to the dizzying pace of the “digital age” - specifically about the speed by which technology changes, grows, updates, enhances, is created and destroyed. Similarly, we have a lot of contributions of thoughts and opinions about how this speed infiltrates our lives and the consequences to our mental and physical well-being, which we are instructed to combat with deep breathing, meditation, mindfulness, digital detoxing, and dry January (but for social...
Many email newsletters we receive start with “Dear [NAME],” - and “NAME” is magically replaced with your name. Just today, I received an email with the subject line “made me think of you, Emily (offer info inside)”. Now this was very insulting to me. The person (but mostly their automation) who sent this email to me clearly did not think of me. Maybe they had some thought of the collective “me” because they thought about everyone on their email list as a general whole. But I felt that they...
Dear friend, On Friday I’m hosting the first of what I hope to be many conversations for those of us in the social profit (new name for the non-profit) world, dealing with the deep, contradictory, messy, important topics that we face daily in our work. This week’s call is called Venting About Time and Urgency in Social Profit Work. I got into social profit work thinking that before too long, the organization I was working for would solve the issue we were addressing - closing the education...