More on Academic Travel

Well, I honestly didn’t expect my last post to cause a stir—I think I hit a nerve.  So I want to summarize some excellent points people made in response.

First, I think a better title for the post would be, “People should be more reflective about why and how much they travel.”  Forgive my rhetorical flourish of calling academic travel “evil.”  But the story at the start of the post is true, and I was genuinely annoyed. Some other important points:

Stage of Career

You definitely need to travel more earlier in your career—you’re building a social network.  How much more is the tricky part.  For grad students and pre-tenured faculty, it helps to have a mentor whose advice you can trust.  Someone you can ask, “Should I go to this?”

Kids & Tenure

My reluctance to travel is very much based on my parenting style and priorities.  (Please play “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Cat Stevens while reading this paragraph.)  But my kids were born after I had tenure, and my pulling back from travel happened as a tenured faculty member.  Could I have traveled less pre-tenure?  I think so–somewhat. Junior faculty parents are in a tough spot. But there’s nothing wrong with putting family first, if that’s your choice.

When my kids are older I’ll definitely start traveling more.

The Other “Kids”—Your Lab Group

Do you know someone who is always on the road, and spends very little time with his/her graduate students?  Who is strongly invested in running a big lab group and having big grants, but not particularly invested in the success of those students?

For some graduate students (the kind who just want to be left alone), that works out fine.  Others might want a bit more time with their mentor.  So prospective graduate students need to be sensitive to the mentoring style of  advisors and their own personal style, and try to find someone who’s a good fit.

Local Colleagues

I have an embarrassment of riches in terms of cool local colleagues to interact with. I imagine folks who are not so lucky might want to travel more.

Sub-Fields—Especially Policy

How much it makes sense to travel depends on your (sub) field. If your work is for example about influencing national policy, then traveling constantly is central to how you get your work done.

 

So with all that said, I could say something super accommodating like “everyone has to make decisions that are right for them.”  And I am saying that—mostly.  But I do think we have a bit of cultural dysfunction. Travel is equated with prestige, and some people are not reflective about how much they travel or why.

Looking at the bigger picture, it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow at how much money is being spent on travel. If it’s true that research funds are getting tighter, it will be interesting going forward to see whether our norms about academic travel change.

Limiting Kids’ Screen Time: How Do You Explain Why?

“Mom, you sure played a lot of Pokémon today,” said my 9-year-old son.

I looked at him.  I hung my head.  “You’re right,” I said.  But I was caught in a frustrating part, and the same characteristics that make me good at finding a bug in code (“I’m going to fix this if it kills me”) also sometimes make me stubborn about a video game (“They say you can catch a Riolu here, and I’ve tried 100 times… so where’s my Riolu?”)

I should back up a bit.  The previous weekend, it rained all weekend. Again. (Atlanta is on track to set a rainfall record this year.)  And in the middle of a weekend at home where our plans were rained out, our household “screen time” limit was chaffing on the kids.  We let them have at most 45 minutes in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon of screen time–any kind of screen.  On a rained-in weekend, my son was challenging why we had this rule.  In exasperation, he asked, “Show me the study that says it’s bad for you!  What study shows that?”

Oh, ouch.  He’s got a point.  I told him about Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together. I told him about the cool paper by Morgan Ames and Jofish Kaye about how parents of different social classes manage their children’s media use differently.  But honestly I couldn’t come up with a hard reference.  How could you do a careful study of that, I pointed out?  So I trotted out the music analogy.  Look: some parents think it’s wonderful if their kids practice a musical instrument five hours a day. Some parents want their kids to be concert musicians and focus on just that one thing.  We don’t. If you played your saxophone in all your free time, we’d say you should take a break and go play a video game!  A healthy life is balanced.

Ye standard “Life is Balance” speech was not especially convincing.  If I could’ve pulled out a careful study proving my point, he would’ve accepted it.  But I didn’t have one.  (Please send me references!)

And I swear I didn’t do it on purpose–the Pokémon thing. But this morning I turned to him and said, “So yesterday you pointed out that I played too much Pokémon. Why did that bother you?”  And he replied, “well I mean, Mom you were just sitting there all day. You didn’t do anything else.  You…”  He stopped and looked at me.  “Ooooh, wait….” He smiled and shook his head.  He understood.  The perfect pedagogical lesson–and totally accidental.

In response to this my younger son did a comic role reversal, and made me promise I would be more careful about my screen time, or they’d have to start timing me. I sheepishly agreed.

How do you manage your children’s screen time? How do you explain the rationale for your policy to your kids? Leave me a comment!

On Google Glass and Gargoyles: a Call to Action

Wearable computing first entered my social circle in 1993, when fellow grad students at the MIT Media Lab (led by Thad Starner) started inventing and wearing devices of their own design.   The amazing thing to me is that a key social implication of wearables was predicted a year earlier (1992) by novelist Neal Stephenson in his book Snow Crash.   Stephenson used the term “gargoyle” to refer to someone with a wearable who is not really listening to you:

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.

Since the announcement of Google Glass (for which Thad was lead technical advisor), a productive public conversation about its privacy implications has begun.  I’m glad we’re all talking about the privacy factor, but I don’t think enough attention has yet been paid to the distraction factor.  Sherry Turkle wrote in her book Alone Together that our devices are increasingly preventing us from being fully present. I recently quit playing the game Words with Friends because it was always drawing my attention.  I would start playing at an entirely appropriate moment, but then that moment would pass and part of my attention would still be on the game. I have a tendency to be absorbed by games, and having a really good one in my pocket wasn’t working for me.  So I made a conscious decision to quit, and have been in a more comfortable daily rhythm since.

Since some time around the invention of stone tools, humans have lived immersed in socio-technical systems: richly connected combinations of people, tools, and social practices.  Each of these affects the others.  Who we are as individuals and who we are as a culture are intertwined with what tools we possess and how we choose to use them.  There are things about future wearable computers that I am looking forward to.  I said hi to a Georgia Tech student on my way into a restaurant with my family last night.  If my glasses could have reminded me of her name, I would have been grateful.  And I hope this support would help me truly learn her name, though I fear some people would use such a support to not bother to try. And the privacy implications of course are headache inducing.  When we have face recognition working, next could I please have bird recognition?  (Was that really a piping plover or just a sandpiper?)  How about rock recognition?  (Is that schist or gneiss?)  It’s a naturalist’s dream.  There will be a myriad new applications of wearable computing and augmented reality, some trivial and some profound, that we can’t yet begin to imagine.

But you know what I’m not looking forward to?  Hey–are you listening to me or are you reading your email?  I’ve spent 20 years with friends with wearables, and some of them, sometimes, do indeed live up to Stephenson’s “gargoyle” moniker.  Are we about to be even more alone together?

Some wearables advocates argue the opposite–that a wearable stops you from having to look down at your phone, and helps keep (at least part of) your attention where you are.  Only time will tell if they are right.  If wearables ever play Words With Friends… look out.

It’s not just the device, but how people use it.  And a key challenge is that we are all increasingly connected.  Teenagers say they text so many times a day because their friends are texting them.  It’d be rude not to reply, wouldn’t it?  It can become a challenge for any one individual to opt out and make a different choice.  In the 1990s, the director of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, told faculty that he expected them to read email every day–even while on vacation.  One faculty member responded to this by planning a vacation to a remote island where there was literally no possibility of Internet access.  One wonders if such islands even exist any more.  It can be a challenge for any one of us to change the pattern, because we are all interwoven in it.

What is mindful use of technology? To address that question, we have to ask, what is the good life–for us as individuals?  As families?  As communities? The issues expand uncontrollably.  We can in the end merely say: Mindfulness is important.  We must make self-reflective choices and not get sucked into dysfunctional patterns by our technologies.  And it’s a learning process.  We all learn together to put a new technology in its proper place in our lives.  My children don’t watch as much television as I did as a child—they don’t want to.  Sometimes it takes a generation to adjust. And then a newer technology comes along and we all go back to square one.

For the present, I have a call to action: Can we all agree not to silently tolerate gargoyles?  If you’re talking to someone with a Google Glass and they seem to be not paying attention to the conversation, do something goofy and see if they notice.  Make a silly face or stick a finger in your nose.  When they ask, “What are you doing?” You can grin and reply, “I was wondering what you were doing…..”