It's interesting that, every time an article comes up like this, I wonder why I never seem to experience the same kind of digital addiction or negative feelings that other people do - and then it turns out I'm already doing almost everything the article suggests for "unplugging". I've taken an hour long walk every single day for the past 15 years, and shower, and make sure I'm not getting overwhelmed with notifications. Yet, I feel no desire to interact with the physical world. I prefer being online, perhaps because I know how to handle it properly. I wonder how much of our misery is caused by poor user-experience defaults that people don't think to change (like always-on notifications). We get used to a corporate-designed hellscape and think that's the only way to experience a digital existence.
Technology is just a delivery mechanism which can be used for good or bad interactions. The problem is some technology is optimised for delivering the bad interactions because it benefits the technology vendor. Use technology that you control and decide when to interact with.
What I see is a lot of people saying on the one hand “I want my privacy and to be left alone” then hiring a vendor that is motivated to take your data and bug the shit out of you because it’s cheaper and subsidised by this poor behaviour. On top of that they then install apps which damage multiply that.
Incidentally on notifications all my kit is set on do not disturb all the time apart from alarms when I need to get up.
> perhaps because I know how to handle it properly
A subset of people seem to share this sentiment. From their perspective, the rest of us are somehow just doing it wrong when it comes to being online. What they never seem to have, however, is a clear understanding of what it's like to be on the other side.
A little vignette: I've been entirely off of social media for about 10 years, as in no accounts. Very recently, however, a friend of mine went on a trip and said the best way to follow along was on Instagram. So, I created an account and followed just that person and one other close friend, who is a fan of posting pics. Straight away, I was bombarded with an endless repeat of advertisements in the feed for some kind of colon cleansing technique. I'm unaware of any problems with my colon, so just ignore it, right? It's not that easy. Now, I have ideas about colon difficulties implanted in my brain. And it's now crossed your mind, too.
Some major forms of digital media insert themselves between me and my friends, rather than simply facilitating communication. In doing so, they hijack the power of human relationships.
It bends people. I'm not sure how else to say it. From where I sit, progress likely means giving up on maximalist capitalism and developing online stuff that strikes a balance between everyone needing to make a living and everyone needing to be cared for as humans.
I'm happy to see that you are able to strike a good balance between those two worlds and, in an ideal world, that should be the ideal outcome, rather than going back into the stone age.
Noticed the same in myself and my numerate, STEM minded colleagues. There’s some research that suggests understanding how to spot and reason through why something is logical fallacy acts as an inoculant against fake news[1].
It’s a recent category of analysis but subsequent studies suggest it’s real.[2]
Knowing how the sausage is made lends to awareness this stuff isn’t divine mandate. Disabuses people of pseudo religious belief in politically contrived economics, etc. If you consider religion is not the content of a holy book but a state of belief in socialized babbles essentialness to existence, American Civic Life looks a whole lot like a religion.
