Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
Do we use our social media apps or are they using us?
Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism is a refreshing take on how to wisely leverage social media and technology without becoming consumed by it.
In a post Covid19 world with businesses shifting to virtual operations, Newport provides a timely blueprint for how to use technology without it using us.
Why Is Social Media Addicting?
Granny On The Slot Machine
It’s easy to wonder why that little old lady goes to the casino and plays the slot machines for hours, smoking a cigarette missing time with her family. She’s after a reward.
The brain finds randomized rewards addicting.
Every time you post, tweet, snap, beep, boop or bop, you are pulling a slot machine lever. The likes, retweets, comments or snap streaks you unlock are your rewards. And, if you are super lucky, you hit the 777 Jackpot — going viral.
The brain craves novelty. Every time you get one of these notifications your biochemstry is responding in the same way a drug addict’s responds to that first shot of heroin. You get a rush of your pleasure hormone, dopamine, into your blood stream and your brain wants more.
More pleasure, more stress?
There is a reason why Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook use the color red in their notifications. The color red ignites a gushing surge of the stress hormone cortisol into your brain which triggers your fight or flight reflex.
The business model of social media is simple: Maximize users’ eyeball time spent on the app. Setting their unread notifications to red gets you to emotionally engage with the app.
The users of social media are thus caught in a game of brain biochemistry hormonal ping pong between addictive hits of dopamine and heart squeezing pangs of cortisol.
Wired To Worry
You might be in 2020, but your biology is in 2020 B.C.
We’re basically apes with iPhones and social media platforms understand this.
The person who says they don’t care what other people think about them usually is the person who cares the most. And, biologically we really can’t help it.
Status consumes us.
In 2020 B.C. your status and acceptance by the tribe meant the difference between life or death, food or no food, shelter or no shelter, mate or no mate, protection from a warring tribe or vulnerability to being scalped during their next raid on your village.
Social media has brought to scale and found a way to quantify in real-time the perceived social status of over 3 billion users for everyone else to see and track. It’s turned into a status scoreboard.
Show a great photo of your abs in the right lighting — boom the likes go up and your status does too.
Post a Twitter drama queen rant about how Starbucks gave you cream instead of almond milk — watch your status plummet.
Who’s up? Who’s down? What’s trending?
Randomized Rewards + Status Tracking = Addiction
What’s It For? (Fat Cows In A Field Of Content)
Social media’s worst side effects only come out when we mindlessly graze and consume its content.
Social media isn’t evil. It can be used to raise billions of dollars in charity or it can be used to help ISIS recruit new members.
I was shocked to see I was spending over 4 hours a day on social media apps like Twitter and Instagram. While I was justifying it by saying it was to promote my training business to find more clients, the truth was I was mindlessly scrolling through news feeds, grazing like a fat cow in a field of content.
Cal Newport suggests that we take a hard look at the single greatest one or two benefits we can derive from social media use and only use those platforms when we are on “purpose”
Are you using social media out of purpose or boredom?
As a private coach, social media’s greatest two benefits to me are:
- Keeping a visual record of who I train.
- Allowing me to connect with prospective clients.
That’s basically it. And, I can get these two key results from using social media for less than 10 to 15 minutes a day instead of using the apps for hours of mindlessness.
Newport also suggests to erase social media apps from your phone and only access social media apps via your laptop. With apps like Twitter having great desktop usability, utilizing these apps on a larger device will limit how much social media you carry around in your pocket throughout the day. It can also draw a clearer line between use for purpose and use for filling white space in your day.
Summary
Is social media using you or are you using it? Is social media an amplifier that just makes up more of what we already are or is it changing how we socially interact with one another? These are questions that have no clearly defined answers.
Humanity operates at about a five to ten year lag time between when a new technology comes out and our ability to wisely use it: traffic lights game out years after the car did, drones took the FAA over five years to develop a license for, and Facebook was harvesting your data for over ten years before the government figured out what it was doing.
Right now, we are entering the end of that ten year window on social media’s age. But unlike cars, or drones or data harvesting, wisdom to use social media will need to largely come from the individual user, not Congress.
Buy The Book
Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism is a refreshing take on how to wisely leverage social media and technology without becoming consumed by it.
