In an age when Apple, LG, Huawei, and Samsung are jamming more processing power and functionality into each smart phone iteration, an unusual Kickstarter campaign has bucked the trend. Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang have developed the Light Phone: a phone that just makes phone calls. As former Google employees, Holier and Tang understand that “Your Time = Their Money” (248). This is just one example of the Digital Minimalism movement.

Digital Minimalism Movement

The Digital Minimalism movement is gaining momentum. People are beginning to recognize the negative impact that the unfettered adoption of new technology is having on their lives.

Digital Minimalism is

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. (28)

Cal Newport roots this philosophy in three principles:

1. “Clutter is costly” (36–43). As Gord Downie once sang, “When something’s too cheap, somebody’s paying something.” So-called “free” social media technologies cost us our attention. When this book was written, Facebook was worth approximately $500 billion, leveraging a global population of approximately 2 billion people who give an average of 50 minutes of their attention daily to the social media giant. The magnitude is astounding. By way of comparison, ExxonMobil is worth around $370 billion. “Extracting eyeball minutes, the key resource for companies like Google and Facebook, has become significantly more lucrative than extracting oil” (216).
2. “Optimization is important” (43–49). When a technology is deemed worthwhile, it still should not be adopted wholesale. Rather, it is important for consumers (who are, in many cases, the product) to carefully consider how and to what extent they should engage the technology.
3. “Intentionality is satisfying” (49–57). Rather than being swept along with the latest trends, choosing to be intentional about the use of new technologies is immensely rewarding.

While many social commentators suggest adopting countermeasures such as turning off notifications or going on a technology-free retreat, Newport recommends stronger tactics. Since the use of technology already colours our attitude toward it, Newport recommends a month-long unessential technology fast before carefully choosing which services to allow back in.

Those who embrace Digital Minimalism find that they have much more time than they realized. This allows for a more robust engagement with rewarding leisure activities as well as a more focused mind.

Some Personal Thoughts

At first, I wondered whether this book would be of much value for me. After all, I don’t even own a cell phone. However, as I began to think through Newport’s arguments, I saw the way that Twitter and Facebook (not to mention “Plants v. Zombies”) had carved out growing chunks of my time. The allure of the red notification symbol (not unlike Ren and Stimpy’s history eraser button) is engineered to keep us returning to the digital slot machine.

This book is also valuable for parents to think through. The correlation between anxiety disorders and the introduction of smart phones with ubiquitous social media penetration is very suggestive. While I have yet to see evidence of direct causation (that constant connectivity to social media causes anxiety), the precise correlation of the two factors suggests at least some degree of inter-relatedness.

Even if you disagree with Newport’s solution (Digital Minimalism), his diagnosis should not be ignored. Our very personhood hangs on the decisions we make regarding very new technologies.

Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Penguin Random House, 2019.