Digital detox

I belong to generation Y and I know what it means to be addicted to smartphones, to Facebook, to Whatsapp... But as Socrates said: "I know that I don't know", i.e. I am conscious about it and trying to improve how I consume digital media in order to keep my psychological health in shape. There is a lot of articles on the subject, my goal is to share some tips and tricks from my personal experience. I will not discuss the dangers of social media (use of data, manipulation...) nor how digital is disconnecting us from reality (little birds singing on trees).

So why psychological health? because it's as important as physical health but we always tend to ignore it.
The first syndrome of digital addiction is decreasing concentration. Indeed, we are continually interrupted by notifications and can rarely focus on an idea for longtime, leading us to less mental efficiency and serenity.

The second syndrome is emotional dependency on "virtual". We humain beings need to be loved, to be noticed, to be surrounded. Evolutionary psychologists believe it is the result of years of evolution where humain beings, living in tribes, could not survive alone. Being ignored in a tribe means the risk of death and not passing his genes, thus we developed a warning mechanism associated with pain. Researchers have proved that the same areas of our brain are activated when we experience rejection or physical pain. Before digital era, people counted solely on family, on partner, on friendships to satisfy this need of belongingness. Nowadays we rely a lot on virtual "likes" of almost unknown people, which can be devastating when it disappears, because its just virtual!

So how am I trying to have a better control on all of this? here are four advices I am experimenting:

• Use the right media for the right communication. For simplicity, let's consider that there are two types of communication: type A, important and need to reply or take actions rapidly, and type B the less important one. We should use an adapted channel for each type, for example type A requires a channel with instant notification, like SMS, and type B requires non instant channel like Facebook messaging. It means you should deactivate notification from Facebook, and never use it or let your contacts use it for important matters. That lets you avoid the need to check Facebook regularly for type A messages.
• Separate being informed from being entertained. It should be clear in your mind, when you are consuming digital, whether you just want to lose time or obtain information. Personally, I have created two Facebook accounts: a first one where I have fun looking to friends posts and interacting with them, and a second one with no friends, but with only subscription to theater pages, news, articles, music... 
• Put some constraints. I am testing for example the following constraints: keep the phone in your pocket hidden from your eyes, do not check your phone when in presence of others (good for respect too :)), log out each time you go to Facebook, power off phone at night, limit digital consuming time per day...
• Be conscious of your usage. The first idea is to know how much you spend on your phone during a day. I tested an app on Android called Quality Time that shows you how much you use each app. I was shocked when I discovered that I can unlock my phone screen up to 200 times a day! The second idea, a very important one, is to ask yourself each time you want to use your smartphone why I am doing this? what motivated me? what am I looking for?

To be honest, I am still far from my goals, but I am happy to be conscious about it, and that's the most important step !

Third industrial revolution?

Well yes, a big shift in economy is happening in our digital era. Economy is moving from a centralized production system to a more distributed one with the help of internet and information technology. It means that people exchange directly goods and services without the direct need of traditional intermediate corporations. I will illustrate this shift through examples from different sectors:

• Transportation: Uber is destabilizing the taxi industry by its model where non professional drivers serve directly passengers with a sexy and real time mobile application. Before Uber, car pooling was growing for inter cities transportation and thus competing lightly with trains & buses.
• Hospitality: With the same spirit, AirBnb is threatening the established business of hotel chains, especially on the low-end tourism market. Couchsurfing also took a part of this market somehow.
• Energy: Consumers are called to be micro producers through solar energy for example. Energy production would be managed intelligently with smart grids and moreover with connected objects.
• Consumer Goods:  We are witnessing the emergence of websites praising the reuse of consumer goods such as: toys, tools, high tech products... and more generally products that are not used frequently so people rather prefer to rent it. Some even say that this pushing the notion of private property to disappear!
• IT: Instead of centralized datacenters, a new buzz word is here: fog computing. A more distributed architecture than cloud computing, where end devices stores and process information. I was especially impressed by the French Startup Qarnot Computing who proposes computing capacity through its distributed servers in households. Their brilliant idea is heating households using installed servers!
• Finance: Who of us didn't participate through crowdfunding to help the project of an association? the launch of music album? the new idea of a startup? Banks/business angels/love money will not stay the exclusive ways of funding ventures.

Some, like Jeremy Rifkin, call this shift a revolution, the revolution of "commons", a "croudsourced" economy that seems more just and equal. Well, I do not share this point of view. I think that distributed model disrupt the structure of the players in our market based economy, but it does not change the capitalist nature of this economy: private property, seek for profit, class differences... indeed, the established corporations (see above for examples) will loose power to new players who control information. If we take the example of hospitality industry, well yes some big hotel chains will hardly survive in front of Airbnb, but this online platform would behave just as its old competitors: hire employees, look for profitability, compete to have a monopole...

Nevertheless, this shift might provide a good basis for a real conscious revolution on how we manage economy today.  When individuals are more involved in the production system, not as work-providers but as contributors, they will want to contribute also to decision making. What is really missing is a distributed decision making, a real democracy! Digital revolution is a wonderful opportunity for achieving this. I like very much the example of an Argentinian political party (Partido de la red) who's representatives only vote in parliament what people has decided online (Democracy OS).