This post is the first of a series of posts in which I am going to address some of the problems of smartphones, social media, and the internet. Specifically, I am interested in discussing how these digital technologies affect productivity, social relationships, and well-being, and what we can do about it. My aim is to integrate evidence from scientific research, ideas coming from books on personal development, and people’s experiences including my own. I expect these posts would be a good complement to my guide on how to overcome internet distraction.

The three main ideas of this series of posts are

1. A defense of digital minimalism. This is a philosophy of digital technology use developed by Cal Newport, the author of a book on the topic. Digital minimalism assumes that the overall negative costs of using too many devices, apps, and websites often don’t compensate for the small benefits that each service provides. Because of this, digital minimalism defends an intentional use of these digital services and the design of systems to optimize their function.
2. Individual differences matter. Everybody isn’t in the same situation, so digital technologies don’t affect them in the same way. Therefore, the solutions are likely to be different too.
3. Experimentation is important to find the internet’s sweet spot. I believe there is a certain level and way to use the internet that will maximize its benefits and minimize its costs for each person. The way to find it out is by conducting self-experiments with different ways of using the internet.

In this post, I describe my own personal experience with the introduction of mobile phones and the internet. First, I’ll explain how I resisted having a mobile phone and used the internet at public libraries in a minimalist and highly functional way for roughly a decade, before being caught in the net. Next, I’ll describe my own problems with digital technology, especially with smartphones. Then, I’ll briefly describe my failed attempts to have a healthy relationship with digital technology, which led me to try the more ‘radical’ approach of getting rid of my smartphone and the internet at home altogether. I’ll end the article briefly explaining my internet and mobile phone use since making this decision three years ago.

Once upon a time

The Diffusion of Mobile Phones

Prior to the year 1999, when I was 16 years old, I didn’t know anybody with a mobile phone or internet connection at home. This wasn’t a problem. I managed to meet my friends after school or during the weekends to do things together. We used different means such as knocking on our friends’ doors, calling each other on the landline or agreeing a fixed place and time to meet. When we were far away from each other (e.g., on holiday), we communicated using postal letters and the landline. This was the same way my parents and neighbours communicated with relatives and friends.

Things changed a bit when some of my friends acquired the mobile phones that we call ‘dumbphones’ today (i.e., mobile phones without touch screen and the internet). These devices had two key differences from the landline

1. they were transportable and, consequently, it was possible to be available to answer phone calls all the time, and
2. they permitted asynchronic communication via text messaging.

The fact that these phones were mobile had two important consequences in our group of friends. First, people with mobile phones had privileged communication between each other and were able to influence our social dynamics without being physically present (e.g., by calling us and telling us to stop what we were doing and meet them in some other place instead). Second, people were less likely to plan when and where to meet in advance and started to cancel or postpone meetings at the last minute.

Text messaging affected people without mobile phones in a similar way as the first feature: their friends with mobile phones communicated between themselves more frequently without having to meet up. This was a social disadvantage for people who did not have a mobile phone, which made them feel left out. This, in turn, prompted them to buy one.

As the number of people with mobile phones increased, the pressure on people without mobile phones to acquire one also increased. Furthermore, the generalization of the use of mobile phones introduced some institutional changes that stimulated people to buy mobile phones. For instance, public bodies expected to arrange appointments or send security codes via text message, and jobcentres, recruitment agencies, and companies expected their (potential) workers to be available on the mobile phone. So, apart from the social pressure, there was also an institutionalised pressure to acquire a mobile phone.

The Diffusion of the Internet

The story of the diffusion of the internet is slightly different. Back in the day, people didn’t need to pay for their own internet connection to use it. Most people didn’t have the internet at home (nor in their pockets!) as it is so common today. Instead, most people used the internet at the library, work, school, and cybercafés. My first contact with the internet was during high school when, at around the age of 15 (in 1998), we were taught to design websites.

Woman working with laptop in café

Although the internet made it easier to acquire valuable information (e.g., language courses), it also produced an explosion of quite useless and annoying information. For example, it was quite common to receive chain emails asking you to forward them to all your contacts to supposedly get good luck in some domain (e.g., love and health) or avoid a very bad thing happening to you.

Fortunately for me, it took me 9 years to live in a house with the internet since my first encounter with it. During this time, I went to the local library to use their computer to surf the web. I used the internet mainly to download guitar tabs and articles. I saved these downloads on a floppy disk or printed them to use later at home. Using the internet in this way, I was online for one or two hours a week and used my time online to acquire information to use in the offline world. I think this was quite an effective use of the internet.

Caught

I resisted having a mobile phone for a long time (8 years!) after people around me started using them. During this time, I was even prejudiced towards people with mobile phones, who I saw as “posh people who buy things they don’t need.” Anyway, I ended up buying one when I started living in a house without a landline. As I was looking for a job, I needed a phone to be called for job interviews, which was the typical way to be contacted by then (at least, in Spain). Consequently, I bought a mobile phone.

A year later, one of my housemates installed the internet. So, I stopped going to the library and bought a laptop to use the internet at home. My internet habits changed as a consequence. I stopped using the internet as just a way to acquire valuable information which I had to make an effort to acquire (i.e., walk to the library and focus on collecting the information I needed in one hour). Instead, I started using the internet as a form of entertainment that consumed more and more of my time. I streamed films and video clips on websites such as YouTube; had prolonged and intermittent conversations via Messenger and Facebook; made online “friends” with common interests on MySpace; and tried to find love through dating websites such as Badoo. These had two obvious consequences in my life:

1. I wasted a lot of my precious time on low-value activities that I could have used for more creative, fun, and productive activities in the offline world, and
2. I was frequently interrupted and distracted from what I was doing by all those messages coming from Facebook and Messenger. Furthermore, it was quite an inefficient way to meet new people and have a proper conversation.

But these things didn’t bother me at that time…

Mindlessly Buying a Smartphone Wasn’t Very Smart

In 2007, the year I acquired my first mobile phone, Apple released the first iPhone, and, with it, mobile phones merged with the internet. Over the following years, more and more people have acquired smartphones and these devices have an increasing number of applications. Before I acquired my own smartphone, I noted a remarkable change in people’s behavior: people spent more and more time looking at these screens. I used to laugh at all these groups of people in cafés, who were browsing their smartphones instead of talking to each other. Nevertheless, I don’t think I understood the nature of what was going on until I bought a smartphone myself.

Man getting bored while his friends looked at their smartphones

In September 2015, I moved to Durham (UK). Although I had been living abroad for most of the previous four years without needing a smartphone, I somehow convinced myself that buying a smartphone was a good idea. I thought a smartphone was going to be very useful to communicate with my family and friends in Spain through WhatsApp as ‘everybody’ was already doing at that time. In the beginning, I was blinded by the features of the device. I could read my email, search for directions, look up words in the dictionary, and be informed about the news on the go.

Later, I found myself being interrupted from what I was doing (e.g., studying or having a conversation) by continuous notifications from social media, emails, and so on; and scrolling through Twitter, Facebook, or the news every time I was a bit bored, facing a challenge, or lacking motivation. My behavior became different. Instead of enjoying what I was seeing with my own eyes (e.g., a beautiful landscape or a cool live performance), I needed to take a picture or video of everything, even when I rarely posted anything on social media. Every time I didn’t know something, I couldn’t wait and needed to know the “truth” immediately by asking almighty Google.

At some point, I became very aware of my problem when I didn’t go for a walk along the coast or to dance salsa, which are things I really love, and instead, I stayed at home being entertained by the internet on my laptop or smartphone. Moreover, every time I replaced fun, productive, and interesting offline activities with merely entertaining online activities, I felt bad about myself. During these times, I always thought the same:

“I only have one life.
Is wasting my time on the internet how I want to live it?”

The Origin of the ‘Offline Diet’

My dissatisfaction with the role that my smartphone and the internet were playing in my life led me to search for ways in which I could have a healthier relationship with these technologies. My first step was to use Freedom to block my access to distracting websites such as online news outlets, Twitter, and Facebook during my time at work. My second step was to get rid of all my social media accounts, delete email apps from my smartphone, and turn off notifications from WhatsApp.

Although these measures were useful to some extent, I kept coming back to some social media sites and I still consumed lots of news in my spare time. Because I felt bad about wasting my time on these things, I decided to try a more radical approach: to live without a smartphone and without internet at home and see what happens. I called this way of living ‘the Offline Diet’, as it seeks to maximize the time spent offline.

How I Use the Internet Today

This post is based on some notes I took the day before I started a 1-month self-experiment on living without my smartphone or internet at home (July 2019). I wanted to check whether this new way of living was as beneficial for me as I thought. The results of this experiment were so positive that I followed the Offline Diet for four months more when I lived alone in a house without internet. After this experience, I have moved quite a lot and have been working from home, so I have been using the internet at home again for the last 2 years and a half. Nevertheless, I am currently blocking most of its features for the largest part of the day. 3 years later of the experiment, I still don’t have a smartphone.

I enormously benefitted from mimicking my internet habits from the days before having internet always available in my home and in my pocket. I will give the details in the next posts 😉.

Ángel V. Jiménez