Book Summaries: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
- Elaine Wen
- Apr 18, 2020
- 9 min read
Finished on 4/18/2020
1. Summary
Digital minimalism is the use of technology in a way that actually betters humanity. It is essentially the author's philosophy of using technology. He hopes for digital minimalism to provide a "constructive way to engage and leverage the latest innovations to your advantage, not that of faceless attention economy conglomerates, and to create a culture where people can confidently say: “Because of technology, I’m a better human being than I ever was before.”
2. Structure
Part One: Foundations
A Lopsided Arms Race: describing the "attention" economy and how big tech makes money off of users' time and information in a way that uses psychological tricks to get people essentially addicted to their services
Digital Minimalism: this is where digital minimalism comes in… how it can help us to be better in control of our digital lives
The Digital Declutter: the action Newport recommends people to take in order to begin using digital minimalism
Part Two: Practices
Spend time alone: the importance of solitude on our health and how technology can take it away from us
Don't click "like": "conversation-centric communication" instead of "connection-centric communication"
Reclaim leisure: the benefits of engaging in craft, physically demanding highly rewarding leisure activities instead of mindlessly browsing or using digital tools
Join the attention resistance: reclaiming our attention back from the attention economy and engaging with social media more meaningfully
3. Key Takeaways (aka what will I remember about this book in a year)
1. Solitude
Solitude is super important in allowing a person to process and make sense of ourselves, to reflect and to essentially come to terms with ourselves. Unhealthy dependence on technology as a distraction/dampener takes this much needed state of solitude away from us. This book also explained to me why journaling is so good for mental health; it's because journaling is basically "productive solitude" in that it allows for self reflection without any outside input. It allows us to get more in touch with our emotions on our own and to really process things.
2. Intention > Distraction > Convenience
Using technology with intention is more important than using it to distract ourselves or for the sake of convenience. We can largely go without lots of our typical technological habits, even if it would be minorly inconvenient. The benefits far outweigh the detriments.
3. Conversation Centric Communication
Instead of engaging in mindless "connection-centric communication" that is largely based on empty likes and comments on social media, I should engage in more conversation centric communication that is truly focused on the people themselves and allows me to engage socially with other with more intention. I'm going to make time to call and actually have a conversation with my friends.
4. High Quality Leisure Activities
I want to have more "crafty", outdoorsy physical leisure activities. This is important in "sharpening the saw" and being a healthier, happier human! :)
5. Action Steps!
Digital Declutter: doing the 30 day digital declutter and then rebuilding my tech habits…. Sadly not going to do this in quarantine just because of the uhhh unique quarantine/covid19/zoom university situation right now lol
Social Media: engaging in more conversation and less empty connection… will minimize time down to 20-40 min per week … also the dunbar number of 150 on facebook… will not be friends on FB with everyone and accept all their requests
More writing and journaling: some journaling ideas to use are "5 things to focus on this semester" and "the plan: a list of life values in categories of relationships, virtues, and qualities"
4. Quotes & Notes
Approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves.
Outsourcing your autonomy to an attention economy conglomerate—as you do when you mindlessly sign up for whatever new hot service emerges from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist class—is the opposite of freedom, and will likely degrade your individuality.
Three crucial benefits provided by solitude: “new ideas; an understanding of the self; and closeness to others.”
Intention trumps convenience.
Don’t, however, confuse “convenient” with “critical.”
Solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” (Blaise Pascal)
Eliminating solitude also introduces new negative repercussions that we’re only now beginning to understand.
When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. We shouldn’t be surprised that these absences lead to malfunctions.
The intricate brain networks described above evolved over millions of years in environments where interactions were always rich, face-to-face encounters, and social groups were small and tribal. The past two decades, by contrast, are characterized by the rapid spread of digital communication tools which have pushed people’s social networks to be much larger and much less local, while encouraging interactions through short, text-based messages and approval clicks that are orders of magnitude less information laden than what we have evolved to expect.
The unintended side effects of digital communication tools—a sort of social fast food—are proving to be similarly worrisome.
The low-bandwidth chatter supported by many digital communication tools might offer a simulacrum of this connection, but it leaves most of our high-performance social processing networks underused—reducing these tools’ ability to satisfy our intense sociality.
These seemingly innocuous interactions is that they teach your mind that connection is a reasonable alternative to conversation.
The idea that it’s valuable to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is largely an invention of the past decade or so—the detritus of overexuberant network scientists spilling inappropriately into thesocial sphere.
As an academic who studies and teaches social media explained to me: “I don’t think we’re meant to keep in touch with so many people.”
As Aristotle elaborates, a life filled with deep thinking is happy because contemplation is an “activity that is appreciated for its own sake . . . nothing is gained from it except the act of contemplation.” In this offhand claim, Aristotle is identifying, for perhaps the first time in the history of recorded philosophy, an idea that has persisted throughout the intervening millennia and continues to resonate with our understanding of human nature today: a life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.
“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.” - Theodore Roosevelt
One way to understand the exploding popularity of social media platforms in recent years is that they offer a substitute source of aggrandizement. In the absence of a well-built wood bench or applause at a musical performance to point toward, you can instead post a photo of your latest visit to a hip restaurant, hoping for likes, or desperately check for retweets of a clever quip.
[The executive was] just raving about these people spending twelve hours a day on Facebook . . . so I asked a question to the guy who was raving: “The guy who’s spending twelve hours a day on Facebook, do you think he’ll be able to do what you’ve done?”
The large attention economy conglomerates, these benefits are like the prize in the Cracker Jack box—something appealing to get you to tap the app, at which point they can proceed with their primary objective of extracting as many minutes of your time and attention as possible for their profit machine.
I conjecture that the vast majority of regular social media users can receive the vast majority of the value these services provide their life in as little as twenty to forty minutes of use per week. This observation terrifies social media companies because their business model depends on your engaging their products for as many minutes as possible. This is why, when defending their products, they prefer to focus on the question of why you use them, not how you use them. Once people start thinking seriously about the latter question, they tend to recognize that they’re spending way too much time online.
Few things can replicate the benefits of connecting with your fellow citizens, so get up, get out, and start reaping these benefits in your own community.
I want you instead to think about these services as being blocked by default, and made available to you on an intentional schedule.
Social media professionals like Jennifer approach these tools differently than the average user. They seek to extract large amounts of value for their professional and (to a lesser extent) personal lives, while avoiding much of the low-value distraction these services deploy to lure users into compulsive behaviors.
“In the early years, I used to accept friend requests from anyone,” they said. “But I don’t think we’re really supposed to be connected to so many people so frequently.”
Jennifer now tries to keep friend engagement* below the Dunbar Number of 150—a theoretical limit for the number of people a human can successfully keep track of in their social circles.
To a social media pro, the idea of endlessly surfing your feed in search of entertainment is a trap (these platforms have been designed to take more and more of your attention)—an act of being used by these services instead of using them to your own advantage. If you internalize some of this attitude, your relationship with social media will become less tempestuous and more beneficial.
The key to embracing Slow Media is the general commitment to maximizing the quality of what you consume and the conditions under which you consume it. If you’re serious about joining the attention resistance, you should be serious about these ideas when confronting how you interact with information on the internet.
Declaring freedom from your smartphone is probably the most serious step you can take toward embracing the attention resistance. This follows because smartphones are the preferred Trojan horse of the digital attention economy.
“Your Time = Their Money.” You should feel empowered to instead invest this value in things that matter more to you.
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.
My hope is that digital minimalism can help reverse this state of affairs by providing a constructive way to engage and leverage the latest innovations to your advantage, not that of faceless attention economy conglomerates, to create a culture where the technologically savvy can upend Sullivan’s lament and instead say with confidence: “Because of technology, I’m a better human being than I ever was before.”
These corporations make more money the more time you spend engaged with their products. They want you, therefore, to think of their offerings as a sort of fun ecosystem where you mess around and interesting things happen. This mind-set of general use makes it easier for them to exploit your psychological vulnerabilities. By contrast, if you think of these services as offering a collection of features that you can carefully put to use to serve specific values, then almost certainly you’ll spend much less time using them. This is why social media companies are purposely vague in describing their products. They hint that you just need to plug into their ecosystem and start sharing and connecting, and eventually good things will happen. Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you’re able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing—enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve.
But as is becoming increasingly clear to those who have attempted these types of minor corrections, willpower, tips, and vague resolutions are not sufficient by themselves to tame the ability of new technologies to invade your cognitive landscape—the addictiveness of their design and the strength of the cultural pressures supporting them are too strong for an ad hoc approach to succeed. In my work on this topic, I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.
People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.
It’s probably more accurate to say that 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.
Compulsive use sells... the attention economy drives companies like Google into a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.”
“Apps and websites sprinkle intermittent variable rewards all over their products because it’s good for business... carefully tailored to elicit strong responses.
Companies didn’t invest the massive resources necessary to perfect this auto-tagging feature because it was somehow crucial to their social network’s usefulness. They instead made this investment so they could significantly increase the amount of addictive nuggets of social approval that their apps could deliver to their users.
The underlying behaviors we hope to fix are ingrained in our culture, and, as I argued in the previous chapter, they’re backed by powerful psychological forces that empower our base 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.
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