NewsLab

Max H. Lavine Award Winner Pam Bjorklund

 Q: What would you say the Lavine Award meant for you?

A: I was so honored, but also so scared to deliver this address, the scary part for me comes from the fact that the audience of the CSS community is my toughest audience. The recognition and respect of one's peers and one's students is the finest kind of recognition that one can get. I've had other honors in my life that have been meaningful, but to get that kind of recognition was not expected. It was one of the finest things that I've ever experienced, so it was a little scary to be talking to the audience that means the most to me, the Scholastica community is like family in ways that I can't even articulate at this point.

Q: Can you talk about the process of trying to put together this speech and how you create meaning through it for this community?

A: I knew from my tenure here that the recipients of that award gives the convocation address in the fall, so I knew when I received it in the spring that it would involve preparing this approximately 10-minute speech to be delivered in the fall to the Scholastica community. I work a lot in the summer. I teach a class and have other courses that I have to revise and get ready for the fall and there's a lot of work I do here in the summer, so I really couldn't focus at all on the work until I'd done this speech. There was nothing else that could get done until I had done this speech.

So the process for me was decided. I needed to address it early and get it done early, then I was on the lookout for ideas and I just sat with it for a few weeks. It took me the first couple weeks of June knowing that I had to get ready for the class I was teaching in the summer. It took me a couple weeks to kind of filter and decide what exactly I wanted to say, and I didn't know what I wanted to say, but I knew that it would need to have something to do with some ideas that started percolating at the end of May when I went to that school of business and technology ethics integration seminar, and I heard Aaron Senvalt speak, and he talked about the importance for him of the still small voice within in terms of how he behaves ethically in his position as C.E.O. of Minnesota Power.

So I began to think about that and where that all comes from. That's what really interested me and I didn't really get any answers there about where that comes from so I had to think about that. But I knew that night that that would be the focus of this speech, trying to put together something to do with that and the other experiences I had in May of having to deliver those ethics presentations to the hospital system in Ashland, Wis.

The final step of the process was just happening upon this book that I thought looked interesting, which is a book by Gary Small called I Brain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. I read that and became very concerned when I saw the research he cited about how the hardwire capacity for empathy in human beings, according to his research, seems to be dwindling a bit. And that caused me to be really concerned. I'm a psychiatric mental health nurse, and empathy is what I would consider my most important clinical tool, empathy being the capacity to think and feel one's self into the inner life of another person, and that tool is an important source of knowledge of other human beings and their inner lives. And so empathy is critical to what I do. Plus I happen to know that all of the psychotherapy research in my field points to the quality of the therapeutic relationship as the best predictor of successful outcomes, and you can't have a quality relationship as a therapist with a client without empathy.

So I have long been interested in empathy as a source of knowledge and then more recently interested in empathy as a source of moral knowledge, and so when I read that book and saw that research, I thought, wow, the speed of evolution is accelerating and part of what's being involved out of us is our capacity to read each other's non-verbal cues, and consequently each other's intentions. If you think about it, cave people needed to understand quickly how to read others, to know whether they should get out there spears or extend their hand, so it was a matter of survival in a very real sense back then, but it's still a matter of survival today. I know that clearly because I also know from 25 years of clinical work with people that empathic failure is very destructive, especially to small children who rely on others to develop their self-image and self-concept. So empathic failure when you're little and reliant, when that goes away, that's a real problem for development in those critical periods. So empathy inside care-giving relations and empathy inside the helping professions is just critical, and I've long been interested in that.

So I guess those three events spurred the thinking that then resulted in the speech. And of course my daughter has been much on my mind all summer, as I've been marveled at her use of technology, it just all came together. I suppose you can say I used my daughter and my relationship with her as a kind of teaching device, a way to frame the ideas that I wanted to express, that were triggered by those three external events and experiences that I had.

Q: Do you think empathy is a lot of reading peoples signals? Do you think that's a huge part of empathy?

A: I think it is. I guess you could think of empathy as a kind of vicarious introspection. You have to be able to go inside yourself and draw upon your own experiences in order to think about and try to feel what somebody else might be feeling, so there's that piece of it that doesn't require face-to-face contact, but what you also need is cues from the other, and if you're in a situation where you never have an opportunity, or rarely create the opportunity for face-to-face contact, or visual cues, or an opportunity to see and experience the richness of another person's response to you, then you're missing out on a huge piece of information that you then put together with your own experiences and your own inner thoughts and feelings to kind of read yourself into that other person's life.

Q: Do you think it's feasible to reach out beyond St. Scholastica to slow down the fast pace we're going at with technology?

A: I'm pretty confident I'm not the only one who read that book, and I'm pretty confident that this discussion is taking place in other places. I mean I really am. I'm quite sure I'm not unique, I'm a lot like a lot of other people. So number one, I think the discussion is taking place elsewhere. I also think in a practical manner, when we're looking to choose our values and choose how we want to spend our time and what we want to do with the moment in time that each of us has, we make choices and we make changes within our narrow realm. And so I do what I can do here now with the people that are in my life and perhaps I reach a broader audience when I do presentations and when I write papers that get published, but if I felt that it was my responsibility, or if I even felt that I had the capacity to change the whole world, I would just not get out of bed that morning. I just wouldn't be able to do it.

An interesting story I got is a colleague of mine was sitting way in the back of the Mitchell, along with a bunch of other students, who would not have been freshmen students because the freshmen were down in the front, but he said that the back area of the Mitchell looked like a Christmas tree up there because there were so many cell phones going off and people texting during my address that it looked like Christmas tree lights. I don't take offense to that, it's not that they weren't listening; they probably were listening, but they were exercising their hard-wire capacity to multitask, so I don't take offense to it because that is the world we live in, and that is our reality, that is what students do.

Q: I asked that last question in a broader sense, meaning that if we take the time to slow down in a fast-paced world, then we end up putting ourselves at a disadvantage since we will miss out on things happening around us, what do you think about that?

A: Am I going to miss out? I notice that in my daughter. It's like she can't not have the cell phone nearby because she might miss out on a connection with somebody, so it's really hard for her to set it aside. That does seem to be a significant fear, that if I slow down then I'm going to be left behind, if I don't have this on all the time I'm going to miss out. I notice it in myself and in my field all the time. It's like if I don't read every link that gets sent to me because there's something interesting here for me to read, then I have that fear that I'm not keeping up, that I'm missing out on some critical thing in my field that I need to be aware of to be a good teacher or to be a good scholar.

So the pressure to process all of these inputs and stay on top of all of this knowledge is intense, but we all have to negotiate it differently. I make my choices, other people will make their choices based on their value systems and who they want to be and how they want to live their lives, but I think we all have to grapple with that fear of being left behind, because we are on an accelerated treadmill and it's going to be that way for a while.

I know enough about history to know that these periods of acceleration happen periodically, but they're not constant, like there have been eras in human history that are like this one, such as when the stone age turned into the bronze age, and when the bronze age turned into the iron age, and then the industrial revolution happened and we are in this information revolution, and maybe it happens for a couple of centuries. We struggle with it, but then human history seems to stabilize for a while and then there's another leap, then it plateaus, and then there's another leap. I'm not the best student of history, but it seems to me that that's how it happens. We are on an accelerating cusp, where we are leaping to another plateau and it's tough.

I go to the Internet for my news, the papers and blogs I want to read I read online and I don't even look at the papers that are stacked up for us to read. But if those papers had different content, I would welcome reading them. My sense is that in the future, print media will be more like news magazines, where there are analytical pieces, where there's a week's worth of news processed and analyzed in different ways. So what's going to be in those newspapers in the future is going to be different stuff, and it may indeed be something that I want to sit down and read while I'm taking a break.

Q: There are some people that would say we're not moving fast enough, not to say that we're not way ahead of where we were 10 years ago, but for example some people thought that we'd be living on the moon in 2010. What would you say about the idea of us not moving fast enough?

A: Yeah, like if we blow our planet before we have the capacity to move to another planet then we're going down with it. But what you said brought to mind some feedback that I got back from a nursing faculty member who was in Finland this summer, and she said that their capacity in Finland to use their technology applications are more sophisticated, and more people are more adept at it, far more than we are in the U.S.

There are countries out there that we are way behind the curve on. And I'm not suggesting we don't need to catch up, because we do, but I'm hoping that we will catch up and move on into the future in thoughtful and intentional ways and not let the train drive us.

Q: Have you talked to your 13-year-old daughter about this and her use of technology?

A: Yes, and it's been a learning process because children's capacity to use technology responsibly grows with other capacities to be responsible. There was a time last year where she, without me knowing, went online and set up a MySpace account, pretending to be 18 or 21 or whatever the minimum age is because you don't have to say you're 13. I didn't know that I needed to set limits on this, maybe when she was in 4^th grade, and so I'm dealing with it a little late because she's my only child and I don't have a lot of experience. I mean I don't use Facebook, so I'm learning as she grows how to help her use it responsibly and so yes, there had to be limits, so that account is gone and I had learning how to monitor her computer use so that if she does it again I know. I had to learn that, but yes there have to be limits, and I think that around cell phone use to.

It's something that she's getting more responsible with as she gets older, but it's becoming something that you have to start very early with children towards educating them about the responsible use and the potential dangers. Because yes, she did receive on her cell phone a pornographic image from someone who had seen her MySpace account, because she was uninformed enough and immature enough at 12 to put her phone number on her account. So there was a big to-do around that, and the cell phone use was gone for a while and now she can use her cell phone to call these certain people and no one else, and when she's 15 she'll have more latitude, and when she's 18 she'll have even more latitude.

The dangers for children are very high. We talked to a police officer because of that incident, who showed me online, how rapid this is, that he showed me the MySpace profile of someone who was obviously 10 years old, and they're all over the place, pretending to be 21 year olds and it's dangerous, and my daughter showed me that it can be dangerous.

Q: When did her texting start alarming you?

A: It was just something I noticed, initially when she got the cell phone she had unlimited texting, it was really fun and I was learning it along with her, so it was fun to text each other and have fun with it. Then I began to notice that she'd really rather text me than talk to me because it's faster, more convenient, more fun and then, as I discussed in my speech, I believe that there are broader implications and deeper meanings, so I had the opportunity to talk to her about these deeper meanings, and I can choose now to not accept her texts.

As for MySpace stuff, just two weeks ago on MPR they were talking about the results of a social psychologists longitudinal research on Facebook and social networking sites and loneliness. And he had discovered that the social networking capabilities that we have now really don't address loneliness effectively. People are not less lonely as a result of Facebook and MySpace. It surprised me that people are just as lonely if not more so than ever.