Cal_Newport

This book argues that technology, especially social media, has been deliberately engineered by Silicon Valley to be addictive, and that often there are detrimental impacts to the products we all use every day. That argument makes sense in that these products are measured by the amount of time they are used per user (and thus the advertising revenue generated), and have evolutionary pressure to find ways to increase user minutes per day. There is also research cited in the book that anxiety levels in teenagers have increased in a manner which correlates with the release of the smart phone. Now, I don't think I could ever be a digital minimalist as described in the book, especially when work expects so much connectivity from me (it will be interesting if a right to switch off ever passes in Australia, put it that way), but I do think there are interesting ideas here. For example, asking why you have certain technology is probably reasonable. The low hanging fruit here seems to be smartphone apps for most people -- can you explain why you have all those apps installed? Especially when many of them are bad for your privacy? The bar proposed by…