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I think my experience would line up with the author's fairly well if I tried something similar. Honestly I know I spend too much time on social media and whatno

I think my experience would line up with the author's fairly well if I tried something similar. Honestly I know I spend too much time on social media and whatnot, but even before the Internet I spent a lot of time on my computers so if I were to unplug from everything completely I'd just be bored and miserable. Maybe I'm not the most enlightened individual ever but I don't see how spending your free time idle or reading books instead of screens is somehow intrinsically better than using technology how you feel it benefits you the most. To be blunt the whole concept to me reeks of "back in my day..."

clentaminator 11y ago
I think the best take-home from the article is simply that your screen time is a problem only if it's distracting you from the things you'd rather be doing. If you're spending the majority of your Internet time researching a specific topic, or interacting with others online about that topic, or something you're specifically interested in, then there's not really a problem. As you say, the alternative is spending time offline focused on something else, and neither online nor offline is inherently bad. It's only bad if you're online and you want to be e.g. watching a Coursera video or having a language lesson over Skype, etc., and the incoming Facebook chat messages, tweets and Slack notifications are constantly pulling away from your intended purpose.