This millennial generation of ‘instant gratification’ has surrendered its autonomy to a single brick of steel and silicon. This is a concern as serious as global warming. Technology should improve our life, not distract from it. To achieve a life where we are not displacing our time to internet, we have to declutter our online life. For A 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. The previous blog concluded with a philosophy suggested by Cal Newport in his book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. A philosophy that gives us the control back in our lives which is known as digital minimalism. Digital minimalism, he explains, is a “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.”
It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy
Cal Newport, Author, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world
It is close to impossible to give up the technologies right now in this world. Fewer and fewer modern jobs allow you to avoid using computers and smartphones. But those who have a choice and want to realise the cliché ‘YOLO’ can adopt the minimalist attitude. According to Newport, to re-establish control, we need to rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation. He suggests the first step is “the digital declutter process”. “Much like decluttering your house,” he explains, “this lifestyle experiment provides a reset for your digital life by clearing away distracting tools and compulsive habits that may have accumulated haphazardly over time and replacing them with a much more intentional set of behaviours, optimized, in proper minimalist fashion, to support your values instead of subverting them.”
What Tristian Harris warned us about – how handful of tech companies control billions of minds everyday – is what the elephant in the room is. However, in late 2019 Google launched a set of ‘experimental apps’ designed to help users to become better aware of their device use and therefore reduce their screen time. Google described its “Digital Wellbeing Experiments as a platform to encourage designers and developers to build digital wellbeing into their products. Anyone can use the platform to share their ideas and experimental tools to help people find a better balance with technology.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt5LY5TeTVQ
The various wellbeing experiments involve:
- Unlock Clock, that shows you how often you unlock your phone.
- We Flip, lets a group of friends or a family disconnect from technology altogether by flipping a big switch. And if anyone unlocks their phone, the session ends for everyone — almost like making screen time a competitive family sport.
- Desert Island and Morph, meanwhile, take an app-centric approach to screen-time reduction. The former requires you to go a day with only your most essential apps, while the latter helps you stay focused by giving you the right apps at the right time of day.
This problem of behavioural addiction is the biggest problem in the contemporary world, which is the foundation of most of the problems in this world right now. This attention economy of tech companies has drastically changed how humans live, how they talk and their relationship with their families, friends and with themselves. We need technology for morally good reasons, it should give us the extraordinary power to bind ourselves together to tackle threatening problems like global warming, rather than manipulating kids to ‘socialise’ by maintaining their ‘snapchat streaks’.
Digitally Undigital 