While penning his thoughts in the latter stages of 1940s, the Trappist monk and an eminent scholar, Thomas Merton discussed how the ingredients of technology penetrate, and render a new shape to the internal lifestyle of modern people.
He was also of the view that television could have a substantial role as the artificial alternative to the world of entertainment rather than basic natural love and emotions.
An eminent German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, discharged similar thoughts five years before Thomas Merton’s comments.
Heidegger said mentioned that the shifting from speaking to the writing zone, the use of typewriter was a suitable substitute.
But, the transition was not without its flaws. In spite of embracing the convenience of writing and scripting, the typewriter equipment had snatched the decency of manual creativity. The transition from hand to machine had happened naturally and discreetly such that the mechanization had become the essentiality in human life.
As one staggers in the modern digital environment, these observations by Merton and Heidegger seem a bit bizarre in today’s context. It is a known fact that both of them spent most of their adolescence in a world, which was natural, and there was a distinct absence of technological dominance, far from the intricacies of the virtual world.
Nowadays, people do take solace from modern gadgets and devices, which are digitally equipped together with the power of artificial intelligence. The human behavioral attitude of over-reliance on goes quite well with the digital smartphones.
An added contribution is the entry of modern software that stimulates a person’s fondness towards gadgets and appliances, and the bonding is hard to disseminate.
In light of Cal Newport’s latest book published in February 2019 under the nomenclature, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, the penchant for modern-day devices is duly addressed.
Newport goes about his subject with an uncompromising confrontational and logical technique, which surely seems for many as radical. This is essentially, what draws one about this book: it does not strike any blows, insisting on progressive changes in behavior if people are to get an opportunity to rebuild a deliberate strategy to their digital domain. The very first section of the book lays the dilemma and takes us through this process of detoxification; the second episode demonstrates what one ought to do with the new minimalist existence.
Deep Work’s bestselling author presents a technology-based conception that has already bettered thousands of lives in this informative and inspiring creation. Digital minimalists are scattered everywhere, like cobwebs. They are the people, who are serene, cool and able to have lengthy discussions on their mobiles without casting desultory glimpse.
They can get busy in a decent book, a gardening chore, or a relaxed daylight move. Without the insatiable impulse to report the interaction, they can have loads of fun with family and society. They remain aware of the day’s headlines, but they do not feel stressed by it. They do not encounter apprehension of isolation, as they now know what practices give credence and contentment to them. Newport still lends people a title for this silent motion and helps to make a convincing argument in the tech-sopping community for its gravitas.
Pervasive-sense suggests to turn off alerts or obligatory ceremonies like watching a digital siesta and, they don’t back up far enough to help an individual retain control of the technological existences, and the mandates of household, peers, and employment complicate efforts to disconnect entirely. What one requires rather is a careful way of deciding which tools to choose, for what considerations and on what situations.
Newport recognizes the fundamental precepts of digital minimalists and the opinions that encompass them, attempting to draw on a variety of true-life examples both from Amish farmers to anxious parents to Silicon Valley techies.
He certainly indicates that how these people rethink their association with social media, reinventing offline world simple pleasures, and reconnecting with their inner characters mostly through regular seclusion periods. He then accords artifices to integrate these usages into a person’s life, beginning with a thirty-day planning process of digital decluttering which has eventually helped thousands, who feel less confounded and more assured.
Technology is neither right nor wrong, inherently. The secret is to use it instead of allowing it to exploit an individual for promoting the values and beliefs. This book points the way forward. It is straightforward to feel upset at the job. It feels like a person never has time to do anything substantive between packed itineraries with email messages, conferences, and pass-ups and the continual dragging of social media and the 24-hour media frenzy.
Thus, when Cal Newport, creator and faculty member of computer science, published Deep Sometime in 2016, many would deem this as a smarter way ahead.
In the book, Newport suggested that one needs to be intentional about how the time is spent to do the most select work and live a systematic life. The suggestion was meaningful in 2016, and still, in many ways, it is relevant now. In the next few years, people’s lives have become more hectic and disordered, particularly when it fits the mutual technological alliance.
It can be as fruitful, and as annoying depending on how an individual uses them like email messages, messaging apps, social media, and so on. How can one get the maximum out of the cool technology sections while safeguarding oneself against the awful?
The element of technology has been a significant factor in the financial growth of mankind. It is the symbol of prosperity in the modern era. However, one has also got to determine what technology can have profound impressions, many of which are staggering, so an individual must continue to engage holistically in emerging technologies to start figuring out how to optimize them, what to accept, what to eliminate.
In the subject book,Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Cal Newport strives to answer these enigmas. One can also restore mutual relation with technology to assist all human beings by matching the digital minimalist acumen and not the opposite because that can be damaging.
Would you like to read more about this topic? This book might interest you: Digital Minimalism.