A Call to Cut Back Online Addictions. Pitted Against Just One More Click.
“We’re past the stage where they’re novel, but not to the point where they’re stable.”
He estimated that nearly 2,000 people worldwide said they would participate in his challenge, tailoring their restrictions to match their work demands
but hoping to at least limit their daily diet of news and social media.
With Silicon Valley under pressure to address the addictive quality of its innovations, Mr. Newport described his informal
experiment as a way for people to control their digital intake, particularly since the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Newport, who runs a blog about managing digital productivity, encouraged his thousands of readers
to remove every piece of digital interaction that wasn’t critical to their work and lives.
“Going completely cold turkey in all of these different realms at once was too much.”
The challenge through January was issued by Cal Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University.
