![]() Step Two: Replace Technology with Meaningful Alternatives He also provides guidance for identifying what is “optional” while noting that it may be different for different people. He observes that it will take a week or two for you to break your habits, so this timeframe is necessary to create new habits. Step one of the digital declutter borrows from the packing party popular among modern minimalists, but instead of packing up everything you own and only unpacking necessities, Newport proposes that you remove all optional technology from your life for 30 days. Newport is putting forward a call to level the playing field and encourage users to adopt a “philosophy of technology use that covers from the ground up which digital tools we allow into our life, for what reasons, and under what constraints.” Borrowing language from the modern minimalist movement, he defines this new philosophy of digital minimalism as “ philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.” He then invites his readers to reset their “haphazard” relationships with digital media and replace them with intentional ones, in a three-step process, which he terms the “digital declutter.” Step One: Take a Break Newport traces the ways social media giants like Facebook exploit ideas from social psychology, using our innate desire for social approval and intermittent positive reinforcement to maximize the time we spend on their service for their actual customers: advertisers. We adopted smartphones and social media based on the benefits they promised, and then didn’t notice as they slowly changed and grabbed more and more of our attention, paradoxically increasing our connections to others while also inducing greater feelings of loneliness and anxiety. ![]() Newport argues that we are on the losing side of a “lopsided arms race” that we didn’t realize that we signed up for. The first part of the book lays out the problem: most of us have (without realizing it) become digital maximalists, adopting any new technology or service that catches our interest. “Human beings are not wired to be constantly wired,” he declares in this incisive critique of modern technological life-particularly as it relates to social media and smartphones. These harmful effects (and how to combat them) are the focus of computer scientist Cal Newport’s new book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. What I, and many others like me, did not realize was the extent to which constant access to the world’s information would ultimately harm us by shredding our attention spans and turning physical socialization into virtual socialization. I have always loved tinkering with computers and finding new, more efficient ways of doing things, so I jumped at the chance to buy a smartphone as soon as I could reasonably afford it (even if it wasn’t the iPhone that I really wanted). I acquired my first smartphone in 2011 while I was a graduate student. I would occasionally try, but no matter how interested I was in the subject, I would inevitably get bored after only a few minutes and then combat the boredom the way so many people do-by pulling out my smartphone and flipping through social media. After finishing graduate school, I worked in the private sector for a year before starting my academic career, but my reading habits didn’t change. I told myself that it was the busyness of this particular season and didn’t worry too much about it. When I got to graduate school, my regular reading stopped altogether. I read a little less in college because much of my reading time was taken up with reading for class, but I had an annual tradition of reading The Lord of the Rings over Christmas break. Title: Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
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