Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Author:Cal Newport [Newport, Cal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

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Whether or not you accept my proposed philosophy of conversation-centric communication, I hope you do accept its motivating premise: the relationship between our deeply human sociality and modern digital communication tools is fraught and can produce significant issues in your life if not handled carefully. You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.

Any digital minimalist must confront this reality and manage his or her relationship with these tools accordingly. I’m an advocate for deploying a conversation-centric approach for this purpose, because I fear any attempt to maintain a two-tier approach to conversation—combining digital communication with old-fashioned analog conversation—will ultimately falter. That being said, others might be stronger than I am when it comes to maintaining a healthy balance between these two interactive magisterium, so I’ll resist the urge for dogmatism on this point. The key is the intention behind what you decide, not necessarily its details.

To aid this minimalist pondering, this chapter ends with a collection of concrete practices to help you reclaim conversation. My now standard caveats apply: These suggestions are neither comprehensive nor obligatory. They instead provide you with a sense of the types of decisions you can make to help move back toward the type of communication we’re adapted to crave.

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