A groundbreaking conference called Wisdom 2.0, with top executives from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and eBay, which I attended last weekend in Silicon Valley, gave me tremendous hope for the future. These practical visionaries in social media are now bringing the ancient wisdom of meditation and other disciplines into their company’s leadership development, learning and personal growth departments. They are offering mindfulness meditation training to their employees as they’ve found it leads to greater focus and creativity—and it helps the bottom line. (These are publicly held corporations, after all.)
These four corporations have connected over 2 billion people, 1/3 of the planet–creating tremendous political empowerment (as seen in the Middle East recently), as well as spreading spiritual wisdom and practices worldwide. Talk about having impact! As they change internally, it ripples out worldwide.
Organized by Soren Gordhamer (with a live streaming watched by more than 133,000 people), the Wisdom 2.0 conference inspired me with the power of bringing together seeming opposites: spirituality and technology. This is another reflection of the Age of Synthesis, with new hybrids, blending and fusion which I’ve written about in The Practical Visionary and teach in my Visionary Leadership trainings.
Chris Sacca, a strategic advisor to Twitter and former executive at Google, said that when you publish your internal values externally on Twitter or Facebook, your external audience will hold you to them. You can’t ultimately fake it in social media, he stated, because people can fact check you on the internet for truth.
Meng Tan, who created a mindfulness meditation training at Google called “Search Inside Yourself,” said the important thing is how you are being, not what you are doing. He translated Buddhism into the language of technology so he could understand it and share it more widely. He talks about “high resolution perception” for example—detecting subtle changes in emotional expression. Meng promotes meditation at Google not as “stress reduction” but as helping increase “success and confidence.” Engineers don’t want to slow down and relax, but rather speed up and be more creative.
Popular brain researcher David Rock, who trains Facebook managers, told the audience that when you study your brain, you activate your observational circuitry—the same brain circuitry that you activate in mindfulness meditation, as you are becoming aware of your thinking processes.
Jack Kornfield, a renowned meditation teacher and co-founder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center, said three key things which mindful meditation develops are awareness, loving kindness and interconnection with everyone and everything. Roshi Joan Halifax, a Zen priest, spoke about the essence of Buddhism as social networking. But she noted that while technology is “a real dharma door– every stick has two ends.” Many people have voiced concerns about the shadow side of the new social technologies–distraction and “continuous partial attention.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., a former professor of medicine at University of Massachusetts Medical School and an acclaimed pioneer in the use of meditation for healing, encouraged people to bring mindful meditation practices right into their use of social media to create more balance in their lives.
Linda Stone, who pioneered multi-media at Apple and social computing at Microsoft, told the audience that while past decades have emphasized connection, multi-tasking, “anytime, anywhere, any place availability,” the current reach of technology into every facet of our lives is now creating new priorities: protecting, filtering, trust, safety and intimacy. This is something I’d like to explore more in depth in my upcoming writings and trainings.
Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio spoke at the last session of the conference about mindfulness meditation has been helpful for him in the stressful world of national politics and how he helped get federal money to teach mindfulness to students in schools in poor neighborhoods.
For more information on the conference and video clips of last year’s Wisdom 2.0 conference, go to www.wisdom2summit.com.
–By Corinne McLaughlin (www.thepracticalvisionary.org)
Comments on: "The New Synthesis of Wisdom and Social Media" (1)
I attended the Wisdom 2.0 as well. It’s very heartening to see the issues of consciousness and mindfulness as top of mind for the tech community. Indeed, as we evolve with our technology, instead of being separate from our spirituality, it makes sense that we will create myriad tools to assist us in our collective journey to enlightenment. It seems social media will be a major nexus for connecting us to each other and helping us to remember what matters. Also, I have to say the session that gave me the greatest thrill was Congressman Ryan’s discussion of his personal journey and his professional work around mindfulness. It truly is a new world.