Digital Minimalism - Cal Newport
On one end of Digital Mount Rushmore, there is Steve Jobs and Bill Gates - the people that ushered in the incredible technology that has changed the way we live. On the other end, there is Cal Newport.
Cal thinks so much like a computer engineer and I absolutely love it. Or maybe he’s just a good writer? It’s so easy to follow his overall argument and I feel empowered after reading his books. I think I want to credit his concise writing to the fact that he is a computer engineering, but really his style is actually just good persuasive writing. He makes his thesis, outlines the arguments he is going to make in support of that thesis, and then checks them off one by one. Persuasive writing is often attributed to holding your readers hands throughout an argument, and Cal is a master of this sort.
One of the central messages of Digital Minimalism is the fact that technology should be strictly judged based on how it adds to your core values. If your core value is connection with your friends, social media can add to that, but is scrolling through your feed 20 times a day really providing you that. Maybe do it once a week to keep up with friends and that is enough. Plus, then when you are actually with your friends in real life, you will be more present with those people - and you will in effect enhance those actual relationships.
There are two very distinct halves to the book. In the first half, Newport basically outlines why it is helpful to go on a 30 day digital cleanse. In order to decide which online activities are useful to our lives, we have to see what we actually miss. Furthermore, its not efficient to say that we will just start limiting the practice. In reality, we just end up falling back into old habits.
After talking about the digital detox, Newport dives deeper into the psychology and philosophy around technology. One of the most interesting references he made was a discovery about our default attention. It is of course natural that we think about our natural lives, but scientists discovered that thinking about our social lives was our resting thought process. And its not even like this was a trained process - they found this tendency in infants. When infants were not stimulated by something else, they same part of their brain lite up as adults thinking about their social lives. Essentially, this is the mindset that social media got us into. This is why we habitually reach for our phones when we have a moment of downtime.
If we are constantly making these little connections, with responding texts or “likes” why do we feel isolated? It’s because little sips of connection don’t equate to conversation. It’s become easier to get that little sip, but it doesn’t satisfy our brains that have been hardwired to respond to need complex facial and audio information.
You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millenia.
The last section in the book is called the Attention Resistance 2.0. The concepts in here aren’t necessarily new - it is still talking about the ways to cut out the mindless time on the web. Instead, it frames these strategies as a direct defense against the assault on our attention that is social media and click-bait news. All of those entities have business models that are founded on keeping people’s eyes on their website for as long as possible. This section of the book is a call to action - don’t be a cog in this machine! The constant devotion of your attention to this is not bringing you any benefits but it is putting money directly in the man’s pocket. Viva le resistance!
Other highlights:
He (Thoreau) asks us to treat the minutes of our lives as a concrete and valuable substance - arguably the most valuable substance we possess - and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time. Pg. 43
The Amish, as it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicate consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values…is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our lives together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down? Pg. 91-92
The cycle of solitude and connection is a solution that comes up often when studying people who successfully side-step solitude deprivation; thing, for example, of LIncoln spending his summer nights at his cottage before returning to the bustling White House in the morning, or of Raymond Kethledge taking a break from the busy courthouse to clarify his thoughts in a quiet barn. Pg. 111
To replace this rich flow with a single bit is the ultimate insult to your social processing machinery. TO say it’s like driving a Ferrari under the speed limit is an understatement; the better simile is towing a Ferrari behind a mule. Pg. 153