CityReads│Why Checking Likes Is the New Smoking?

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Why Checking Likes Is the New Smoking?

You need digital minimalism to quit the addiction to checking likes.

Cal Newport, 2019. Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Portfolio.

Source:https://www.calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/

Carl Newport, author of Deep work, published a new book this year, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. While Newport’s massively popular book, Deep Work, tackled the problems of our always-on connectivity as they pertain to work, Digital Minimalism does this for your personal life.

Digital Minimalism is organized two parts: first part is about the theories, explaining why it is important to adopt Digital Minimalism; and second part is about how you can practice Digital Minimalism in your life. I personally like the first part better. Once you understand the why, it is natural for you to follow the advices.

Why social medias are so addictive?

New technologies such as social media and smart phones massively changed how we live in the twenty-first century. these changes, in addition to being massive and transformational, were also unexpected and unplanned. We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life.

Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable. What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy anice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.

It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.

People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable. We were pushed into it by the high-end device companies and attention economy conglomerates who discovered there are vast fortunes to be made in a culture dominated by gadgets and apps.

Tristan Harris is a former start-up founder and Google engineer who deviated from his well-worn path through the world of techto become something decidedly rarer in this closed world: a whistle blower. Hesaid in an interview, “(technology) It’s not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make their money.”

Inspired by Harris’s interview, Bill Maher concluded in one of his HBO show Real Time On May 12, 2017:

“The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking”.

Tobacco companies “just wanted your lungs,” Maher said, “The App Store wants your soul.”

Behaviors that did not involve ingesting substances could become addictive in the technical sense. Addictionis a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences. behavioral addictions resemble substance addictions in many domains. Pathological gambling and internet addiction are two particularly well-established examples of these disorders.

our new technologies are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions. the behavioral addictions connected to technology tend to be “moderate” as compared to the strong chemical dependencies created by drugs and cigarettes. A moderate behavioral addiction will make it really hard to resist checking your account again and again throughout the day. In many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.

What specifically makes new technologies well suited to foster behavioral addictions?

Intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

Scientists have known since Michael Zeiler’s famous pecking pigeon experiments from the 1970s that rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. Something about unpredictability releases more dopamine—a key neurotransmitter for regulating our sense of craving. The original Zeilerexperiment had pigeons pecking a button that unpredictably released a food pellet. this same basic behavior is replicated in the feedback buttons thathave accompanied most social media posts since Facebook introduced the “Like”icon in 2009. That the outcome is hard to predict makes the whole activity of posting and checking maddeningly appealing.

In the fall of 2017, Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, spoke candidly at an event about the attention engineering deployed by his former company:

“The thought process that went into building these applications, . . . was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in awhile, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever”.

We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us. In the twenty-first century, however, new technologies have hijacked this deep drive to create profitable behavioral addictions. It’s a social-validation feedback loop . . . because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.

This is why so many people feel as though they’ve lost control oftheir digital lives: the hot new technologies that emerged in the past decade or so are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions, leading people to use them much more than they think is useful or healthy. Indeed, these technologies are in many cases specifically designed to trigger this addictive behavior. Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan. We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.

Our current unease with new technologies is not really about whether or not they’re useful. It’s instead about autonomy. We signed up for these services and bought these devices for minor reasons and then found ourselves, years later, increasingly dominated by their influence, allowing them to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave.

Small changes are not enough to solve our big issues with new technologies. The underlying behaviors we hope to fix are ingrained in our culture, and they’re backed by powerful psychological forces that empower ourbase instincts. To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation. What all of us who struggle with these issues need—is a philosophy of technology use—Digital Minimalism.

What is Digital Minimalism?

Digital Minimalism 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 one verything else.

By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. The core question of “is this the best way to use technology to support this value?” leads them to carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly.

Principle #1: Clutter is costly.

Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides inisolation.

Thoreau establishes early in Walden: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” He asks us to treat the minutes of our life 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.

How much of your time and attention must be sacrificed to earn the small profit of occasional connections and new ideas that is earned by cultivating a significant presence on Twitter? These costs, of course, also tend to compound. When you combine an active Twitter presence with a dozen other attention-demanding online behaviors, the cost in life becomes extreme. This is why clutter is dangerous. It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.

Principle #2: Optimization is important.

Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology. Focus not just on what technologies they adopt, but also on how they use them.

Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying.

Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.

At the core of the philosophy regarding technology is the following trade-off: prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide notto use. Their gamble is that intention trumps convenience

The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge ofwhat claims your time and attention is something that persists.

The Digital Declutter Process

1.   Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life.

2.  During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.

3.    At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves inyour life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value.

This process will help you cultivate a digital life in which new technologies serve your deeply held values as opposed to subverting them without your permission. It is in this careful reintroduction that you make the intentional decisions that will define you as a digital minimalist.

Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age,but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.As a computer scientist, I make a living helping to advance the cutting edge of the digital world. Like many in my field, I’m enthralled by the possibilities of our techno-future. But I’m also convinced that we cannot unlock this potential until we put in the effort required to take control of our own digital lives—to confidently decide for ourselves what tools we want to use, for what reasons, and under what conditions. This isn’t reactionary, it’s common sense.

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