Digital Minimalism

摘抄

Part 1: Foundations

1. A Lopsided Arm Race

P15

Bill Maher ends every episode of his HBO show Real Time with a monologue. ... on May 12, 2017, when Maher looked into the camera and said:

The tycoons (巨头) of social media have to stop pretending that they're friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they're just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let's face it, checking your "likes" is the new smoking.

P21 What makes new technologies well suited to foster behavioral addictions?

I want to briefly focus on two forces ...: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

2. Digital Minimalism

P28 definition of digital minimalism

A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized ativities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

P28 "But what if there's something useful to you in there that you're missing?"

Minimalists don't mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

P33 Three principles of Digital Minimalism

1. Clutter is costly

   Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.

2. Optimization is important

   Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truely extract its full potential benefit, it's necessary to think carefully about how they'll use the technology.

3. Intentionality is satisfying

   Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.

P35

This magician's trick of shifting the units of measure from money to time is the core novelty of what the philosopher Frédéric Gros calls Thoreau's "new economics," a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of whatI will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

P37

Thoreau's new economics was developed in an industrial age, but his basic insights apply just as well to our current digital context. ... When people cosider specific tools or behaviors in their digital lives, they tend to focus only on the value each produces. ... Standard economic thinking says that such profits are good, and the more you receive the better. ... Thoreau's new economics, however, demands that you balance this profit against the costs measured in terms of "your life". How much of your time and attention, he would ask, must be sacrificed to earn the small profit of occational connections and new ideas that is earned by cultlivating a significant presence on Twitter?

3. The Digital Declutter

P56

In some cases, you'll abstain from using the optional technology altogether, while in other cases you might specify a set of operating procedures that dictate when and how you use the technology during the process.

Part 2: Practices

5. Don't Click "like"

P101 — P103

When given downtime, in other words, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life.

These experiments represent only some key highlights among many from a vast social cognitive neuroscience literature that all point to the same conclusion: humans are wired to be social.

P110 connection vs. conversation

connection

low-bandwidth interactions that define our online social lives

conversation

the much richer, high-bandwidth communication that defines real-world encounters between humans. Can be face-to-face meeting, a video chat or phone call

P111 — P118 conversation-centric communication

The philosophy of conversation-centric communication takes a harder stance. It argues that conversation is the only form of interaction that in some sence counts toward maintaining a relationship.

In this philosophy, connection is downgraded to a logistical role. This form of interaction now has two goals: to help set up and arrange conversation, or to efficiently transfer practical information (e.g., a metting location or time for an upcomming event).

This philosophy has nothing against technology—so long as the tools are put to use to improve your real-world social life as opposed to diminishing it.

Finally, it's worth noting that refusing to use social media icons and comments to interact means that some people will inevitably fall out of your social orbit. Here's my tough love reassurance: let them go. ... As an academic who studies and teaches social media explained to me: "I don't think we're meant to keep in touch with so many people".

6. Reclaim Leisure

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

P150

Here's my suggestion: schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure. That is, work out the specific time periods during which you'll indulge in web surfing, social media checking, and entertainment streaming. When you get to these periods, anything goes. If you want to binge-watch Netflix while live-streaming yourself browsing Twitter: go for it. But outside these periods, stay offline.

7. Join the Attention Resistance

P160

..., we must first step back to understand the attention economy in which it (Facebook) operates. It's important to know that the "attention economy" describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers' attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers.

P170 Practice: Turn Your Devices into Single-purpose Computers

What makes general-purpose computing powerful is that you don't need separate devices for separate uses, not that it allows you to do multiple things at the same time.

P178 Practice: Embrace Slow Media

不要关注 breaking news:

Unless you're a breaking news reporter, it's usually counterproductive to expose yourself to the fire hose of incomplete, redundant, and often contradictory information that spews through the internet in response to noteworthy events.

我的感受

社交媒体与孤独感

The first of these studies was authored by a large team from diverse disciplines, led by Brian Primack from the University of Pittsburgh. ... The survey asked a standard set of questions that mesure the subject's perceived social isolation (PSI) -- a loneliness metric. It also asked about usage of eleven different major social media platforms. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the more someone used social media, the more likely they were to be lonely.

—P106

这个实验只对被试收集了孤独感和社交媒体使用量的数据，然后发现社交媒体使用多的人更孤独。但是可能是一个共同的因素导致了这两个现象。比如更「外向」的人可能更喜欢使用社交软件，而他们也需要通过与人的交流来驱散孤独感。当他们找不到人来交流的时候（在现代社会还这种现象挺常见的），他们就会感到孤独。而相对内向的人可能用社交软件更少，而且他们可以跟自己玩得很好，一般可以只通过自己做一些事情就不会感到孤独。实验可能需要通过对不同的人增加或者减少社交媒体的使用量，然后在实验前后都测量他们的孤独感，这样可能更有说服力一些。在后面也提到了另外一种解释：

The key issue is that using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing that's massively more valuable.

—P107

即使用社交媒体会占用更有价值的面对面社交时间。

移动端软件

Practice: Delete Social Media from Your Phone

In March of that year (2012), they (Facebook) began, for the first time, to show ads on the mobile version of their service. By October, 14 percent of the company's ad revenue came from mobile ads, ... By the spring of 2014, Facebook reported that 62 percent of its revenue came from mobile, ... by 2017, mobile ad revenue rose to 88 percent of their earnings, and is still climbing.

—P166

移动端的软件和网页端的一个重要的区别是网页端使用的技术大部分是有开放标准的——HTTP 协议，HTML、JavaScript 和 CSS 语言，等等。使用开放的标准意味着人们可以使用不同的服务端和客户端进行通信。不喜欢 Chrome 隐藏掉地址栏中的 www，就可以换到 Firefox，而网页仍可以正常浏览。不喜欢微信网页版中的链接会被改成经过 wx.qq.com 重定向一次 ，则可以写一个 Userscript 将链接替换成原始的链接。而这些操作在移动端都无法完成。用户无法使用他们想用的客户端（或者说第三方客户端无法被写出来），也不能修改显示的内容。

而这也是移动端比网页端更赚钱的原因之一（当然这不是主要原因）。无法使用广告屏蔽器，无法通过更改 CSS 使得显示有通知的红点消失，难以更改 app 的行为（如在进入 app 时不打开到推荐页面而直接进入订阅界面）等等限制都使得人们会花更多时间在这些 app 上，并让他们看更多的广告。

脚注

1. ^  微信网页版中的链接会被改成 https://wx.qq.com/cgi-bin/mmwebwx-bin/webwxcheckurl?requrl=LINK&XXX