Finding Digital Minimalism
In regards to social media, we, as consumers, have become the underdogs in the fight against their time-sucking attention economy. With mobile ads at the forefront of social media platform’s income, their apps have turned into quicksand for the consumer, making it harder and harder to leave them. This continues to feed their attention economy, selling the consumer’s time and eyes. But, this only works if people are in the dark about what is going on in the background of these apps. Once consumers are informed of the issues, they can make the conscious decision to not let social media consume their lives. After you become aware of these issues with our digital spaces, you might begin to wonder what you can do to change that interaction. In order to help move forward and become more productive with our time, there are steps that can be taken towards creating a more minimalistic digital space, specifically on our phones.
So what is digital minimalism exactly? Digital minimalism follows the values of minimalism in general.
“Minimalism is a lifestyle that helps people question what things add value to their lives. By clearing the clutter from life’s path, we can all make room for the most important aspects of life: health, relationships, passion, growth, and contribution.”
Wignall, Nick.
To practice digital minimalism is to create a clutter-free space in your digital world, but that doesn’t mean you have to delete all your apps. The goal of digital minimalism is to help create a more meaningful interaction with your digital environment, with the purpose of enriching your life more and creating experiences that hold value. This entails adding more to your life, not less, as it may seem. The clarity that digital minimalism, and minimalism in general, can add to your life is unparalleled to an otherwise cluttered lifestyle. It helps you have set intentions with your digital space and helps prevent getting sucked into that never-ending digital blackhole of scrolling through content. The three basic principles of digital minimalism are,
“Technology use should be intentional, not habitual.
Technology is for making stuff not feeling better.
Technology should never come before people.”
If we take these into account when interacting with our digital spaces, it should help us create a more digitally minimalist lifestyle.
Now comes the question of how to create a digital minimalistic space. The first thing you can do is delete social media from your phone. You don’t have to delete it completely, but it is useful to set up a schedule that blocks these sites and apps completely for a given amount of time. This can help bring sharper attention and focus to the work you are doing on your device and help eliminate the distraction of social media. But when you are interacting with social media a good tip to keep in mind is to use it like a professional. What this means is you should limit the accounts you follow to a narrowly focused curation of specific accounts that add value to your life and align with your interests. This also means unfollowing the accounts that don’t add as much value, such as the meme accounts. It is important to really focus and question what is adding value and what is just part of the distraction of social media. The next thing you can do is embrace slow media. This means becoming more mindful of the media and news sources you get information from. It is important that the media takes a proper amount of time to collect all the facts before making a statement, but in America, it has become so fast-paced that media, values reaction, over accuracy. It has now been placed on the consumer of this media to find accurate information for themselves. Instead of listening to the rapid and consecutive noise of fast media, embracing slow media require that you focus on reading only the highest-quality sources of news, not all of the breaking news sites. Lastly, what you can do is dumb down your smartphone. It is best to get rid of the distractions at the sources and clearing that from your space can help you find the clarity, productivity, and energy that we have all been lacking as such a distracted society. Once you clear that from your space it is so much easier to focus and spend time on the things that you truly value at your core.
Sources:
“Join the Attention Resistance.” Digital Minimalism: on Living Better with Less Technology, by Cal Newport, Penguin Business, 2020, pp. 213–248.
Wignall, Nick. “What Is Digital Minimalism?” Nick Wignall, 6 Aug. 2020, nickwignall.com/what-is-digital-minimalism/.