Whitney Espich: Hi, I'm Whitney Espich, the
CEO of the MIT Alumni Association and I hope
you enjoy this digital production created
for alumni and friends like you.
Aviva Rutkin: Hi everybody.
Welcome to MIT Faculty Forum Online.
My name is Aviva Rutkin.
I'm the data editor at The Conversation, and
I'm gonna serve as your moderator today.
Today's broadcast is sponsored in part by
the MIT Federal Credit Union, MIT Professional
Education, and MIT's Sloan Executive Education.
Before we get started, as a reminder, we welcome
your questions during this chat.
If you are joining us via Zoom can use the
Q and A feature found on your toolbar and
I think you can use that to upvote questions
from other listeners as well.
If you are watching on YouTube , you can add
your questions in the comments stream.
So, I would like to introduce everybody to
Calvin Newport.
He is the author of six books, most recently
digital minimalism -- "Digital Minimalism:
Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World ." And
he is going to talk to us today.
Welcome, Professor Newport.
Calvin Newport: thank you, Aviva.
I do not have the chat open.
I am honored to be able to 
speak with my fellow MIT alumni.
What I have learned from my students in the
past few weeks is that long slideshows do
not do well over the zoom type format, so
I am going to talk for a little bit, but not
too long.
I have some slides to give you a little bit
of a back story on this book and to summarize
the main idea so that we are all on the same
page, and then I hope after that to switch
this over to Q&A.
There are a lot of interesting questions swirling.
We are in unusual and challenging times.
I look forward to that portion of it.
I thought what I would do is get started here.
I will give you the background on this book.
So I am going to share slides here and I'm
not going to pull out my -- I have a tablet
pen pin I use that keeps my graduate students
-- I can draw notes and things, but I have
terrible handwriting.
So, I want to tell you a little bit about
this book, "Digital Minimalism."
It came out last February.
Let me give you the back story.
To understand this book that came out last
year, we have to go back to a book I published
in 2016, which was this one, deep work.
Roughly speaking, you can think of this older
book as being about some unexpected influences
or impacts of technology on the world of work.
Particularly tools like email, the ability
of knowledge workers to produce valuable knowledge
with their brains.
It's about tech and the world of work.
After that book came out in 2016, it had been
out for a while, and I began to hear from
my readers the same feedback again and again,
which is OK, maybe we buy some of these premises
about what is happening with tech and the
world of work, but what about our personal
lives?
I began to hear from readers , particularly
a growing sense of uneasiness people were
starting to develop about the relationship
they have with, for example, their phones
or their tablets.
Something had changed and people had moved
from exuberant toward uneasy.
I can pinpoint more or less when this change
happened just based on the public reactions
I was getting to my own work.
I have been doing public facing work on tech
and society for a long time.
I write books, op-ed's.
I have a pretty good temperature.
I can take a pretty good temperature of the
public's this -- thoughts on these issues
just based on the feedback I get.
And based on feedback, I could kind of pinpoint
when we shifted from exuberance toward uneasiness
about technology in our personal lives.
Let me try to make this more concrete.
This is from before I began to sense public
sentiment shifting.
This was a talk I gave in early 2016, a TEDx talk on antisocial media.
I wanted to call the talk quit social media.
The organizers of the event were very worried
about it.
When they uploaded the video to YouTube, they
changed the name back.
We can use this as a data point.
People were a little bit nervous or confused
by the idea that we would have talk that was
explicitly negative about social media.
As many people pointed out later , you can
actually see in the audience during my talk
people using social media on their phones.
You could tell at this point that I was not
in the majority on my thinking.
Here's another data point.
This is an op-ed I wrote for the times a little
bit after this, but still in 2016.
It said some negative things about social
media, in context of careers.
I was making the argument that young people
in particular were over or exaggerating the
importance of their social media presence
when it came to career development.
This article triggered an incredibly sharp
backlash.
People were very upset about there being an
op-ed saying explicitly negative things about
social media.
So they went out and got the social media
manager for Monster.com to write an op-ed
about mine saying don't listen to his op-ed.
This gives you a sense of where we were as
a culture.
That changed pretty rapidly.
Let's go forward no more than a year or so,
and that talk that made the organizers of
Ted worried had 6 million views.
So something was changing.
People were interested in this.
I have since written multiple op-ed's about
similar arguments, and the backlash has been
nonexistent.
As happened last time, people were writing
columns about how my column was wrong.
There seems to be a more general acceptance
or interest in these ideas.
I can kind of time this shift.
Somewhere between 2016-2017, we saw this shift
in our culture and began to be uneasy about
technology in our personal life that up until
that point we had been more comfortable or
interest that in -- interested in.
Two questions stem from that.
One, why did we suddenly get so uneasy about
these technologies?
What happened?
And two, what do we do about that?
How do we avoid the negative aspects?
That's the idea behind this book and those
are the two questions I tackled.
What I wanted to do today was just give you
briefly three of the big ideas from the book
surrounding those two questions so that we
are on the same page.
Here is the first big idea from the book.
A brief story is illustrative.
I did this interview around 2016, when people
were still on team social media, for sure.
I did a radio appearance for a Canadian radio
show called the current.
They asked me on to talk about my thoughts
about social media.
I go on air.
It's alive.
I am on air and they are asking questions
about it, and then the host springs and ambush.
Now joining us in the conversation, we have
an artist who uses social media to market
his work.
This was going to be the ambush.
We've got you.
You see, social media is not terrible, or
whatever it was they were trying to say.
But something interesting happened in this
conversation.
They were talking to the artist who said yes,
he does use Facebook to help find customers
for his art, but at some point, he mentioned
how he has to take long breaks because if
he didn't take long, multi-month breaks from
social media, he could not get any art done
in the first place to sell.
And in that, we got to the crocks of what
research shows is making people uneasy about
these technologies.
It is not the specific things people do when
they look at their phone or tablet.
It is not what they are seeing more the particular
information.
It's not so much even concerns about what
happens to their data , even though that is
very relevant to those of us who study technology
and the side he, the average -- society, the
surprising degree to which the average social
media user doesn't care about that.
It was 
the idea that we were looking at these devices
more than we wanted to or more than we thought
was useful.
We were looking at these things so much it
was taking time away from things we thought
were more valuable.
It was this dense that we were losing -- sense
that we were losing autonomy over how we spend
our time.
It was not a particular activity going on
in the phone.
There was a disconnect between the coverage
of the newly emergent social media backlash
which focused extensively on what happens
on the platforms and what happens with the
information.
There was a disconnect between that and when
the public writ large started to become really
uncomfortable.
So, how did that happen, why did we use phones
more than we felt was useful?
That was the other big idea to come out of
this research, which I can really capture
by this quick thought experiment.
If you got a time machine and went back to,
I'm going to say like 2008 or may late 2007,
pretty soon after the introduction of the
iPhone and you took someone off the street
and brought them back to roughly our time
-- for this thought experiment to work, we
can't come back to right now because we are
in the middle of a pandemic, but if we came
back to three or four months ago, what do
you see that is different?
The cars would look basically the same.
In 2008, we had iPhones.
Social media existed.
We had laptop computers and 3G.
The world looked substantially the same but
there would be one major difference that you
would immediately notice if you came from
2008 to three or four months ago.
That would be this behavior.
We forget the extent to which this model in
which our phone is a constant companion is
more newly emergent than we recall.
It's not what we used to do with smartphones.
It's not circa 2007, 2008, what an iPhone
user would do.
This behavior came later.
It is not until you get to 2010, 2012, that
you start to see phones as a constant companion
that we look at all the time.
Where did that come from?
Social media.
We know about this first because we've heard
from Tristan Harris and others who have begun
to inform us about the type of changes that
happened to the major social media platforms
during this time, changes designed to drastically
increase the amount of time we spend looking
at our phone.
There are two major classes of changes that
happen.
The first was the introduction of the like
button and similar features.
The like button was a game changer.
Now, when you check a social media account,
the prize is not just I am going to see some
interesting information about what someone
I know is up to.
The prize is I am going to get information
about other people's approval or lack of approval
about me.
That's an incredibly -- that's an incredible
stimulus.
There is going to be a number that quantifies
the number of people thinking about me or
not thinking about me.
That's almost irresistible.
It's very difficult to ignore that type of
stimulus when it is one app away.
The other thing that happened is social media
switched from their original format -- I'm
going to focus on Facebook in particular.
Their original format, if you remember, was
let's take the idea of the personal website
or the personal blog and make it significantly
more convenient.
It's easier for me to set up a Facebook profile
than it was for me to rent server space and
set up a WordPress, for instance.
That was the whole idea.
You have a profile.
Friends have a profile.
You occasionally logon to see what your friends
are up to.
They went on a trip.
Here are pictures.
That's interesting.
It was about seeing what people were up to
and digitizing person to person interactions
that used to be more analog.
2010-2012, this format gets switched, and
Facebook got re-centered around a timeline
format.
Now you have an infinite scroll, algorithmically
filled timeline that pulls from people's various
timelines and puts together a stream of information
that is appealing and maximizes the amount
of time you spend engaged with the service.
This is a completely different thing.
Now on social media, you endlessly scroll
this algorithmic ally optimized information.
They shifted from the original premise and
instead made it into a highly optimal endless
feed information stream that is very difficult
to pull away from once you are in it.
Tristan Harris in his famous 60 Minutes interview
talked a lot about how you can then manipulate
or engineer the stream to hijack attention
in such a way that it becomes very difficult
to stop looking at it once you see it.
This trend happened after smartphones came
along, after social media came along, this
change happened that made social media services
and order of magnitude more sticky than they
were before.
We didn't even notice it happen.
As a result, we got trained to look at our
phones all the time.
This thing that is making us unhappy is not
a logical consequence of let's say a social
media network or having a connected smartphone.
It is a particular consequence of a particular
business model that was executed to great
effect.
What do we do about this?
This brings us to an idea in the book.
People that seem to be doing well with this
technology and avoiding these issues, a lot
of them share a philosophy that I gave the
name Digital minimalism.
What it says is that you start with here is
what I care about.
Here are my values.
Here is what I want to spend time doing in
my life.
Step two, once you know what you want to be
doing, you ask OK, now, looking at all of
these wonderful, innovative technological
tools that have been developed, what is the
best way to deploy some of these tools to
amplify the things I care about?
Step three, how do I become comfortable ignoring
everything else?
It essentially inverts the way a lot of people
had been approaching these technologies in
the first 10 years after their introduction,
which was the exuberant stage of the cycle.
But if this device, if this app, if this service
might offer anything that is valuable, I should
probably bring that into my life because I
don't want to leave something valuable on
the ground.
If I see a five dollar bill, I want to pick
it up.
So we had been looking at this from a maximum
point of view.
If there's something useful, why not try it?
Because of that, we became overwhelmed with
these services.
We had too many, they became too sticky, and
we lost control over things that make us happier.
So start with what we want to do an employee
that strategically to amplify it.
-- employee tech strategically to amplify
it.
This is a different relationship.
Now, not only are you more selective with
your tools, you know why you are using them,
and it's easier to optimize that.
If the only reason you use Facebook is because
there is a group that is important to you
and you know that, it is easier to realize,
I don't need this on my phone.
It should just be on my computer.
If I'm just using a group, why don't I use
a plug-in so that I don't have to see the
algorithmically optimized timeline, I can
just go to my group.
It tips the cost-benefit ratio, usually decidedly
to your advantage.
One way I try to personify the minimalist
approach -- and this has become particularly
relevant to where we are right now, is to
look to Plato's metaphor of chariot drivers.
This is from his famous dialogue, where he
gives a metaphor to help understand the human
soul.
One way we can understand the human soul is
to have the chariot driver, the rational part
of our brain -- he didn't use those terms
back then, but we can think of it is the rational
part of our brain, and he is trying to steer
the chariot through our life.
There are two steeds he is trying to control.
One is the noble steed, which represents our
noble impulses, our moral intuition about
what feels like it is good and right.
And the other steed represents more of our
baser instincts.
The chariot driver is trying to control these
things and keep moving and the more noble
direction.
A lot of what happened in the last 10 years
is that technologies we brought into our personal
life or relatively innocent or logical reasons
transformed while we were not paying attention
and ended up supercharging the egg noble -- the
ignoble steed. and that is really leading
where the chariot is going.
The minimalist response is to say let's be
more strategic.
Let's use technology in a way that is specifically
designed to give the noble steed more power,
that helps us go where we want to go.
I just want to end this brief introduction
by noting where we are now with the current
coronavirus pandemic.
It's really emphasizing the importance of
this dichotomy that we have.
It makes it very clear that what we are all
experiencing is that these new technologies,
when used strategically right now, can give
incredibly power -- incredible power to the
noble steed.
It allows us to check in via Zoom with family
and friends.
It allows us to quickly look up ways to be
useful to the community.
But the danger has also been incredibly amplified.
If you just give into strolling -- scrolling
through what is on Twitter or compulsively
looking at new stories all day long about
what is going wrong, could go wrong, could
go bad, that same technology has the ability
to essentially pull our chariot into a cowering
fetal position of fear.
So, what is happening now I think greatly
clarifies the stakes being captured by this
philosophy.
When we put this text to use for what matters,
for what is important to us, it makes our
lives better.
When we don't, when we are not very thoughtful
or systematic about what we use and why, it
is very easy for the ignoble half of our metaphorical
soul to pull us into places that make life
much worse.
By recognizing that, we can move the probability
of coming out good and using this technology
more for good than bad, it makes it much more
likely if we understand what these forces
actually are.
So, skipping over details here of how minimalism
works and the experiments I ran.
We took thousands of people and had them D
clutter their digital lives and become digital
minimalists.
There are a whole lot of interesting things
there.
There is a whole lot of information about
technology at work which I write about extensively.
But I want to move toward letting the audience
lead what we discussed with questions.
So, I will sort of step back from my slides
now, and with Aviva's help, hopefully, she
can point me toward some questions.
Aviva Rutkin: we have 13 questions so far.
Just a reminder that you can add years -- yours.
One of our top questions is from Jeff.
He wants to know what are some ways to benefit
from the connections these tools enable while
minimizing the downsides?
Calvin Newport: one of the interesting things
I found in my research is that when you are
talking about digital connection, the type
matters.
An analog component to the connection makes
a vast difference.
Most of the social circuitry in our brains
-- our brains have incredibly vast social
circuitry , which is a huge part of our success,
but it has nothing to do with linguistic communication.
For the most part, linguistic communication
hijacks existing parts of the brains.
So any interaction that is purely linguistic
-- a text message, or a comment left on a
social media post, anything that is pure text
is, from the perspective of your social circuits,
a severely impoverished form of interaction.
It is useful.
Historically, we have had wonderfully productive
epistolary back and forth.
It's a very useful mode of communication.
But from the point of view of not feeling
isolated, feeling connected, nourishing the
human drive for connection , if you can hear
a voice, it makes a big difference.
If you can see someone and hear a voice, it
makes a huge difference.
There is a professor at MIT right now who
wrote a great book about this a decade ago,
I believe it is called "social signals," but
it goes into how the vast majority of what
happens in person has nothing to do with what
I'm saying.
It's how my body is moving.
It's the inflection of my voice.
You lose all of that in text.
In a time of social distancing, the more you
can maintain an analog component to your interactions,
the better.
The more you can outside talk to someone else
with whatever the magic distances, six feet
or whatever, and actually see in real time
a full
Aviva Rutkin: Worried about the knowledge
of social media on teens and children we created
a generation who have never been away from
social media.
How do we raise minimalist kids deck of -- kids?
Calvin Newport: When you look at social psychology
research literature you will never get clear
signals.
I'm a computer scientist, not a labs scientist
but those of us in the community who are from
a lab science background, you don't that -- get
that clarity.
It is difficult pull apart confounding factors.
There is an effect now where coming out of
the U.K., there is a contrary and impulse
where there is a reward to be given for trying
to shake up any attempt to say social media
is for sure having negative impact on teenagers
and you.
It is confusing literature but having spoken
with many of the top people in these fields,
it is confusing but almost for sure , social
media use in teenagers, particularly teenage
girls, is having non-trivial affect some mental
health.
I think the most important data point here
is that teenagers will tell you this themselves.
Typically when we do at be -- epidemiological
research, you are trying to tease out an act
you are unable to direct Lee experience yourself.
You have to use epidemiological studies to
tease this out.
When it comes to mental health come talk to
teenagers and they will say yes, this guy
do all the time on the own is taking the eel
bad and anxious.
-- making me feel bad and anxious.
What should we actually do about it yet coast
our phones and social media use needs to be
introduced later.
We are getting to a point where the argument
of "but my friends do it" will be insufficient.
Almost every ink we prohibit teenagers from
-- everything we prohibit teenagers from doing
it, a psychologist at NYU who I want day maintained
on his website, a great annotated bibliography
on social psychology research on teenagers
and social media.
He likes to a positive deviance matters.
You don't need, for example, everyone in your
son or daughter's class to stop using social
media before it is exceptional for them not
to do it.
You need to people not to do it and that's
it the standard.
-- that sets the standard.
My big picture is, I think we will ship soon
in which we are thinking about 14, 15, 16
being inappropriately young given the power
of these tools and its impact on people's
livelihoods.
My kids are young, my oldest is a halt seven
but if they were older I would have a harder
line drawn there.
I would rather figure out the social impact
you not being on Snapchat then I would want
to have to deal with the psychological impact
of you being almost as all the time area -- almost
tools all the time.
Aviva Rutkin: Another question, they wanted
to know the research showing constant own
use and satisfaction in marriages.
Calvin Newport: I don't know about the research
on that what I do know it is almost certainly
an issue, one of the biggest questions I get
from readers is typically, how do I get my
spouse to stop looking at their phone all
the time?
My advice has always been, and this deals
with parenting, what type all -- what I call
the phone lawyer method.
When you come home, the phone goes in your
foyer.
That is where the phone stays, in the house.
If you need to look something up, you go to
the foyer.
If someone calls you, you have the ringer
on.
If you expect text messages you have to go
over there and check it.
It is a power will because -- powerful tool
because it prevents this thing we have now
where we are eroding the intra-familial interaction
rhythms by doing this all the time.
It shows your kids, if your kids see you always
looking at this, that it comes much more difficult
to actually keep them on a tech illogical
regime that is more healthy -- technological
regime that is more help the.
If you are a heavy drinker it is harder to
make a argument that you should not be drinking.
Simulate the old phones that use to be stuck
on the wall.
There will be family been to it.
-- benefits to it.
Aviva Rutkin: There is a question from Paul,
are there other impactful ways to break compulsive
online have it yet though I have tried use
my phone less and I'm curious to the if there
is anything people are doing that is not affect
it.
-- not effect if. -- not effective.
Calvin Newport: If you focus on, I don't like
the time I spend on twitter, then say I will
try to reduce that, you probably have a lower
probability of succeeding.
I ran an experiment researching the book,
I took Eckstein hundred volunteers and what
I had them do was spend -- 1600 volunteers
and what I had them do is not use online social
media and games.
It did not involve work things.
You could see who succeeded and failed.
Those who came into this with a white knuckle,
let me stop, had a hard time.
Who did well?
Those were adapted the full minimalist program,
which is, I'm going to aggressively I threw
experimentation and self reflection what I
really care about, what matters to me, what
I want to do with my life and time and I will
design my technology have it to amplify these
things.
They are more likely to stick with that because
they are working from a place of positivity.
I am trying to get these changes in my life
because these are going to be powerful, here
is the plan that gets me here.
They are more likely to succeed then just
saying, let me try to stop looking at my phone.
It you do that, people spend so much tracking
-- so much time tracking themselves that it
we take it away it is terrifying.
It is boring you don't have anything to back
fill the time with.
You shouldn't think in terms of, how do I
do this less?
You need to think, how do I do these good
things more?
That will likely stick.
Aviva Rutkin: Let me jump to one question
that says, you note social media is designed
to have an addict to quality -- addictive
quality.
The recommendation is to ignore the that aspect
that doesn't -- how you outsmart the designers
of the platforms and deal with the fact that
they have been working on figuring out this
for a long time you go -- for a long time?
Calvin Newport: I have a chapter in the book
about the ways people are trying to outsmart
the addictive capabilities of these platforms.
The simplest, most effective thing you can
do, get it off your phone.
The attention engineering, the stuff that
makes it compulsive, assumes mobile version.
On your desktop you cut out 80% of what makes
these things addict.
Let's put in a little Frick Dan -- friction.
Don't put in your password manager.
Go to Facebook.com, I have to type in my password
and you look it up, a little traction.
Now you have really cut down the amount times
he will bother doing that.
If you are optimizing, you have to have a
cost function.
You need a cost function optimized.
Once you know why you are using a tech knowledge
he, you have a cost function.
-- a technology, you have a cost function.
You can deploy high-tech tools to basically
cover or obvious gate the stuff you -- obfuscate
the stuff you need.
I talk about how the Facebook features, people
go straight to groups and events.
YouTube, with YouTube, it is almost, it makes
a night and day difference if you have the
browser plug-ins that take the recommendations
and get rid of them.
YouTube becomes this fantastic library.
I need to learn how to do x, let me type it
in and I can find instruction and there is
no Avenue -- algorithmically optimized recommendations.
The simplest thing, don't do any thing on
your phone.
That is where the attention engineering is
off demised.
-- optimized.
Do it on your desktop.
Make it inconvenient.
Consider using tools like plug-ins to actually
get rid of the addict if features.
-- addictive features.
People use it like an hour and are getting
98% of the benefits.
Aviva Rutkin: I know we are coming up on our
time and I want to make sure we get to our
most popular lesson.
Kristen wants to know, do you have advice
for writing procrastination and resistance
to deep work?
I procrastinate for hours even though I don't
use social media, mostly podcast, reading.
Which sounds good to me.
Calvin Newport: Time block.
That is my short answer.
Clearly differentiate working hours from nonworking
hours.
During working hours, you want to allocate
work to time.
During this half hour I will do this, during
this hour I will work on this.
Literally block out, use a column where you
have the hours of the day and rose and you
can block out the hours and label what is
happening.
I have a planner coming out in November that
is just for time blocking.
It is formatted to do this really well.
Time blocking makes a huge difference.
Give your time a job and it changes your relationship
with work.
Puts you in a mind that work, I'm building
an optimal plan.
I want to email here, you see the chessboard,
you move the pieces and when you are in a
particular time block, you are less likely
to procrastinate.
My schedule the pens on me doing -- depends
on me doing this.
If I look at Twitter, I will blow past this
time block and stop everything a Bible have
revealed my schedule and confront that I did
that and I don't want to bother, I will keep
working on this.
If I have a list of what I generally want
to do, you suppose, I will take a You breaks
-- a few breaks.
The warning I will give is that time blocking
is very intense.
When you go from one thing to another giving
your all concentration, it makes you very.
-- very.
-- very.
-- very productive.
it allows you to take a confined chunk of
time and get a lot out of it.
My whole thing is, although I wear a lot of
hats, I don't work past 5:30.
I do it with time blocking.
At 5:31 I am exhausted but this allows you
to extract a time out of your time.
I would say time block your work time as opposed
to running it off a list or God for bid, running
it off your email inbox.
I have a new book about this coming out next
year that gets the intersection of knowledge.
That is a terrible way to take these cognitive
resources and get a good return on it.
Aviva Rutkin: We have many more great questions
but I think we have run out of time for today.
On behalf of the Alumni Association I want
to thank everyone who tuned in online.
Professor, thanks for joining us.
It your question wasn't answered, the Alumni
Association will forward him all the questions.
All the broadcast are available on the MIT
Alumni Association YouTube channel.
You can tweet about today's chat or send questions
and feedback to alumnilearn@mit.edu.
Thanks, everyone.
Stay safe.
Calvin Newport: Thank you.
Whitney Espich: Thanks for joining us and
for more information on how to connect with
the MIT Alumni Association please visit our
website.
