Zomorodi Response

In the technological uprise of the 21st century, we often find ourselves floundering around to simply occupy ourselves. Just now, I checked my phone, and I'm beginning to think it's an act of impulse. We've been coerced into connecting flashing dots to new events and messages. That, along with the tingling need of our minds to just do something simpler is always beckoning.

Our journalist friend and mother, Manoush Zomorodi, dives deep into the problem that recreational technology brings, and explains the psychological connections it has to boredom, our creativity, and productivity. She hosts a podcast in which she hit a wall whilst brainstorming ideas for the next session. She wanted to bring in new viewers and explore interesting topics, but her mind was shooting blanks. The emptiness presented itself so prominently that Zomorodi began digging up her mental past and traveling back to the last time she had an original, creative idea.

She became a mother around the time that the legendary iPhone came into the market, and so instead of exploring the endless creative possibilities of the piece of technology, she was preoccupied tending to her child. The third month in, she found herself feeling rejuvenated and prepared, and so she finally got her hands on the tech. It ended up, to nobody’s surprise, being nothing more than a distraction. When she wasn’t caring for her kid, she was mindlessly scrolling through media. She states that the companies that host the media are constantly at odds, pining for your attention. The goal of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are indeed to act as an escape for some people, but it ends up as an enigmatic mess of time-wasting. Just today, I sat down to work on art and schoolwork and pulled up youtube for background noise. 4 hours later, I caught myself binge-watching Shameless on Netflix with nothing but a single sketch done. The mind river that big media corporations create often suck you in and keep you in the flow for way longer than you intend.

Zomorodi began a project entitled “Bored and Brilliant," an effort to combat these compulsive acts. The task was simple enough- distance yourself from your phones. The project seemed to be a wild success, with tons of stories of those freed from their ball-and-chain scrolling lifestyle and how sprouts of boredom birthed creativity in their hearts, but the data showed on average that only 6 minutes of time was captured from the technology. The scientists reassured her that to be able to make this much progress in a week was a daunting but spectacular task. The conclusion she came up with is that creativity is locked behind boredom and the new-age technology is only hindering us when it comes to advancing as individual thinkers.

As someone who seemingly needs distractions, I wish I could say I didn’t need to rely on technology. I’d like to build a platform on social media in order to ensure a future for myself through making connections online, but I see through the veil of my mind sometimes that I’m doing too much (or too little) too fast. I see that I could only honestly benefit from a challenge presented similarly as Zomorodi’s.

The reflections we can make from this TED talk is that we need to be more conscientious of how we utilize our time. In this world, we’ve got a lot to learn from one another. Hopefully, we can use technology in harmony with our good intentions and thoughts to bring about a better society.