What is addiction? You may associate addiction with alcohol or drugs, but it can manifest in behavior as well, like gambling, shopping, gaming, or internet activities. In addition to exploiting the human need for social approval, social media began to use, as it’s known in psychology, “intermittent positive reinforcement.” This type of reinforcement works because the unpredictability of a reward releases more dopamine, the neurotransmitter that keeps you engaged and wanting more.Īddiction has been intentionally engineered into social technology. In its earliest iterations, the focus was on posting and finding information, not rewarding people with likes to get them to stay online as long as possible.īut the introduction of the “like” button radically changed the psychology of Facebook use, eventually impacting all of social media. Social media and social technology wasn’t born with this intention. In the first part of his book, Newport highlights the dangers of social media, in particular the way it intentionally exploits vulnerabilities in human psychology in order to steal as much of your time and attention as possible. So I’ll use the words social media and digital technology interchangeably when speaking about them. There isn’t one word that applies to all of them all. You could also include digital games and digital streaming like Netflix, which can also be addictive. When I use the word “digital technology,” I’m referring to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, search engines like Google (because they also manipulate their users), SmartPhones, phone apps, and texting. Let’s briefly look at how digital addiction works before we move on to explore digital minimalism, a powerful way to take your time and attention back.

Social media companies intentionally take advantage of your vulnerabilities to keep you scrolling.

The human brain is inherently vulnerable to manipulation. If you’re like most people, you probably find yourself waking up from a digital trance a little more than you would like, wondering why you just wasted the last 30 minutes or even several hours on the unnecessary or the unimportant. It means using them selectively and wisely. “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.”ĭigital minimalism doesn’t automatically mean deleting all your social media accounts or throwing away your smart phone. In his book, Digital Minimalism, Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (affiliate link), Cal Newport defines digital minimalism as: What does “digital minimalism mean”? Can digital minimalism improve your life?

Book digital minimalism