Chapter 36: Further Reading — Digital Minimalism

Foundational Books

1. Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Portfolio, 2019) The primary text for this chapter's philosophical framework. Newport develops his three principles, describes the 30-day declutter experiment, and provides detailed prescriptions for analog leisure, solitude, and intentional technology use. Essential reading for anyone interested in individual-level technology behavior change. Read critically: Newport's evidence is primarily qualitative and self-selected, and his prescriptions assume a degree of professional flexibility that not everyone has.

2. Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Grand Central Publishing, 2016) The precursor to Digital Minimalism, focused on the professional value of sustained concentration and the threats to it from constant connectivity. Newport's argument about cognitive depth as a competitive advantage is more empirically grounded than some of his later work, with useful references to research on attention and distraction.

3. Fogg, BJ. Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019) Fogg's Behavior Model — which holds that behavior is a function of motivation, ability, and prompt — is the theoretical backbone of both platform engagement design and individual behavior change strategy. Understanding Fogg's model helps explain why environmental design works and why willpower-only approaches fail. Note: Fogg applies his model to building habits; this book can be read in reverse to understand how to break them.

4. Harris, Tristan, and Aza Raskin. The Persuasive Technology Lab Reader (various publications) Not a single book, but a body of work from the Center for Humane Technology that Harris and colleagues have produced. The "barbells vs. slot machines" distinction discussed in this chapter, and the broader framing of technology design as manipulation, is developed in detail in CHT publications. The CHT website (humanetech.com) maintains current materials.

Empirical Research

5. Hunt, M.G., Marx, R., Lipson, C., & Young, J. (2018). "No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression." Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37(10), 751–768. The primary empirical study for this chapter. Essential reading for understanding what a well-designed randomized experiment on social media reduction looks like, what it finds, and how to interpret its limitations correctly.

6. Allcott, H., Braghieri, L., Eichmeyer, S., & Gentzkow, M. (2020). "The Welfare Effects of Social Media." American Economic Review, 110(3), 629–676. An ambitious randomized experiment paying Facebook users to deactivate for four weeks. The economic framing and the mixed results (modest wellbeing improvement, smaller than correlational predictions) are important for calibrating expectations about social media reduction effects.

7. Tromholt, M. (2016). "The Facebook Experiment: Quitting Facebook Leads to Higher Levels of Well-Being." Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 19(11), 661–666. The Danish Facebook deactivation experiment, with concentration of effects on heavy and passive users. Complements Hunt et al. by examining complete deactivation (rather than reduction) and a European sample.

8. Kushlev, K., & Dunn, E.W. (2015). "Checking email less frequently reduces stress." Computers in Human Behavior, 43, 220–228. The randomized experiment on batched versus continuous email checking referenced in this chapter. Demonstrates that scheduled checking windows reduce stress without meaningfully harming responsiveness.

9. Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity (Hanover Square Press) Gloria Mark's synthesis of decades of research on attention, interruption, and multitasking, with specific attention to technology's role in attention fragmentation. Provides the empirical background for the notification management and scheduled checking recommendations.

Critical Perspectives

10. Purser, R.E. (2019). McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (Repeater) A critical examination of how wellness and mindfulness frameworks — including digital wellness — can individualize structural problems and reduce political dissent. Essential counterbalance to individual behavior change frameworks. Argues that making individual optimization the solution to systemic problems lets those systems off the hook.

11. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press) Argues that the problems with social media are architectural and political, not problems of individual use habits. A useful structural counterpoint to the digital minimalism framing. Understanding why individual solutions are insufficient requires engaging with arguments like Vaidhyanathan's.

12. Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St. Martin's Press) Specifically addresses how technology harms and solutions are distributed along lines of class and race. Essential for the privilege critique discussed in this chapter — understanding who benefits from digital minimalism requires understanding who is most constrained by technology systems they didn't choose.

Broader Context

13. Schwartz, B. (2004). The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Ecco) Barry Schwartz's influential argument that excessive choice imposes cognitive costs and reduces wellbeing provides theoretical grounding for the "clutter is costly" principle. The accumulation problem Newport describes is partly a choice proliferation problem.

14. Duhigg, C. (2012). The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (Random House) Duhigg's habit loop framework (cue-routine-reward) is essential for understanding why social media habits form, why they're resistant to willpower-based modification, and why environmental design is more effective. The book's core framework complements Newport's prescriptions with a behavioral science foundation.