Walden can’t be the solution
Mindfulness, self-help, and retreat can take us only so far. Digital overwhelm is a social issue.
How should we deal with constant digital communication and information overload? The minor daily disruptions of our personal lives add up to a more significant social and political issue: corporate social responsibility.
So far, strategies to deal with overwhelm almost exclusively focus on the individual side. They refer to actions an individual can take — with withdrawal and self-discipline as the predominant themes. There are countless self-help groups, podcasts, retreats, scientific publications, reports of experiences in online and offline magazines, and numerous books on “negative effects of the Internet” and “information overload”. Almost all of them focus on what we can do ourselves if bothered by our constant distraction.
Self-help and self-discipline
One example is the “r/nosurf” group on Reddit. Their slogan is “Stop spending life on the net.” And their mission statement says:
“NoSurf is a community of people interested in digital wellness and seeks to overcome the harmful effects of excess screen time and information overload. We offer insight into what is going on in your brain while you continuously check social media and ways to help you stop that repetitive, time-wasting behavior. We focus on a healthy, mindful, and purposeful internet use so that our devices serve us — and not the other way around.” https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf/wiki/index,
This is great and important. The board is a collection of testimonials, literature references, practical tips on overcoming bad habits or becoming more productive, contact addresses for those seeking help, and exchanges between users. It has the feel of a self-help group, with talk of recovery, addiction, and success stories. Users tell of the fatal effects of Likes on their psychological well-being, of their turning away from smartphones, of their Instagram addiction, of deleting TikTok, of their year without Twitter. In many cases, success is celebrated as regaining agency and self-discipline. The basic tenor is the belief that sheer willpower can overcome the temptations of the Internet and social media platforms. And this is a great way to start — but not enough to meet the challenges posed to us.
Walden: a modern superhero?
Another approach is to strive to simplify and turn away from the world — hoping for a self-determined life away from excessive smartphone use. There are countless self-help books about such strategies. A classic that is often cited here is Thoreau’s Walden, which deals with the author’s years alone in the forest. (I have to remark: most of the time alone — the hype the book receives as THE best example of withdrawal from the world is not justified in my view. Thoreau was often around people.)
Some people try to go back in time: In an article[1] dating back to 2014, New Yorkers were reported returning to landlines and turning away from their cell phones. This movement toward landlines, or back to the button cell phone, still exists — if not broadly. It promises, first of all, an escape from an increasingly communicative life that we have largely accepted as the new normal. A landline makes us less available to outside demands, less at the mercy of a smartphone’s non-self-selected flood of information. It is a relatively linear form of communication. At the same time, such a decision also involves great ambivalence and practical difficulty. Many will realize that giving up the smartphone won’t be a solution. The convenience is just too seductive. No smartphone means no more easy research, games, quick and distant communication via text messages, and no more camera.
The Mindfulness Hype
Within this approach of individual coping and digital detox, mindfulness has taken a special place as a mainstream approach in recent years. Valued initially as a type of meditation in religious and esoteric contexts, mindfulness as a trend is now omnipresent and closely linked to the quest for self-optimization. Mindfulness serves as a promise of a fundamental solution to the psychological challenges that digital life poses to us. The message is: if we follow the instructions, we will succeed in breaking out of the daily demands, distractions, and overwhelming impressions. [2]
In his essay “The Mindfulness Conspiracy,” Ronald Purser draws attention to the dilemma of the mindfulness trend — in my view, many of his arguments apply overall to the individually oriented approach to solving problematic behaviors in the digital space. It is dangerous to rely only on mindfulness and believe that everything else will take care of itself from his perspective. Mindfulness — for example, in the famous formulation according to Jon Kabat-Zinn — propagates the principle that one individual at a time changes until the whole world changes. Stress is thus pathologized and privatized, and the mandate to deal with it is outsourced to individuals.[3] More radical, political approaches are thus abandoned. Mindfulness deliberately focuses only on the inner, leaving out the underlying conditions that cause inner turmoil.[4]
Corporate responsibility?
Strategies that focus only on the individual ultimately fail when facing society’s problems or challenges. Individuality has its place, and of course, everyone is responsible for shaping their own life. However, the environment and context in which we find ourselves and move cannot be disregarded. In the end, it is a systematic attempt to pass the entire responsibility to the consumer. Of course — we are free to decide how much time we spend online. Still — one cannot ignore the responsibility of the corporations that purposefully try to influence us.
And individualization doesn’t just affect solution strategies. In his book “In the Swarm,” Byung-Chul Han describes the characteristics of homo digitalis and his relationship to fellow human beings. He states that homo digitalis lacks the “we” only established through people’s assembly and actual spatial togetherness. “They are, above all, isolated for themselves, isolated hikikomori, sitting alone in front of the display. Electronic media like radio assemble people, while digital media isolate them.” Sherry Turkle also clearly expressed this image of the specific form of isolation caused by digital technologies in the title of her book, Alone together. Spatial isolation is a feature of the increasing digital relationships between people. This changes our relationships and has consequences for dealing with the adverse effects of technologies. Radical individualism, i.e., a distorted image of general self-efficacy and disengagement of the individual from a systematic understanding of society, has significant implications on how we understand society and solidarity. We have to find comprehensive solutions that serve us all as a society.
[2] Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, 2019.
[3] Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, 2019.
[4] Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, 2019.
