Study Hacks Blog

In the most recent issue of the prestigious American Economic Review, a group of well-known economists published a paper titled “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” It presents the results of one of the largest randomized trials ever conducted to directly measure the personal impact of deactivating Facebook.

The experimental design is straightforward. Using Facebook ads, the researchers recruited 2,743 users who were willing to leave Facebook for one month in exchange for a cash reward. They then randomly divided these users into a Treatment group, that followed through with the deactivation, and a Control group, that was asked to keep using the platform. 

The researchers deployed surveys, emails, text messages, and monitoring software to measure both the subjective well-being and behavior of both groups, both during and after the experiment. 

Here are some highlights of what they found:

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Sir William Osler is one of the most important figures in the founding of modern medicine. In 1910, he published a book titled Aequanimitas: With Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine. It builds on a farewell address he gave at the Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1889, and details his thoughts on what it takes to thrive in an intellectually demanding medical field.

As one of my readers helpfully pointed out recently, chapter 18 of this book contains the following prescriptive gem about how to succeed in an endeavor that requires you to create value with your mind:

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I recently finished Edmund Morris’s epic new Thomas Edison biography. It took me a while to get used to his reverse chronology structure (he works backwards from Edison’s later years to his earlier years), but once I did, I found it riveting.

One thing that caught my attention from the book was the degree to which early 20th century Americans were exposed to rapid technological change. We think the arrival of the internet and smartphones were a big deal, but these innovations were trivial in magnitude compared to the arrival of electricity.

Constraints that had been constant throughout all of human history — the darkness of night, the slow pace of information dissemination — were obliterated in just a few decades.

Edison was born in an age of horses and sailing ships. His death was broadcast worldwide via radio waves, and whole cities — their streets clogged with cars and their skies blotted with steel-girded buildings — temporarily powered down their ubiquitous electric lights to honor his passing.

These changes naturally led to some reactionary technophobia (though, as I argued in a recent op-ed for WIRED, there wasn’t as much of this resistance as popular commentators like to imply). I’m interested in this historical moment of technophobia, as skeptical technology commentators such as myself, or Tristan Harris, Jaron Lanier, and Douglas Rushkoff, are sometimes associated with this tradition by our detractors.

But does this analogy hold up?

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It’s been about a month since I proposed the Analog January Challenge. Accordingly, I’ve begun to receive reports from those who’ve made it through a full four weeks of enhanced analog activity.

I thought it would be interesting to share one of these case studies…

One of the first reports I received was from Edward (not his real name), a young man living in London, who ended up traveling to Florida to visit family during the month.

Edward claimed that jet lag complicated the READ piece of the challenge, but he still managed to finish two biographies, a non-fiction book on psychology, and Gone With the Wind. He also started Little Women, as he figured it was probably smart to have read the book before going to see the Greta Gerwig film.

As for the MOVE piece, Edward noted that “London really does save my butt on this one.” While in the city, he found it both easy and enjoyable to walk its historic streets, observing his surroundings and allowing his own thoughts to keep him company. When the “crazy city noise” got overwhelming, he’d find refuge in Hyde Park.

Edward’s time in Florida, on the other hand, was a different story. As he explained, unless you live in one of the Sunshine State’s big cities, “the incentive to move for any reason is severely curtailed.”

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The major social media services are often described as fundamental platforms of the internet age. The companies that control these services use this argument to justify their astronomical valuations, and their critics use it to validate the need for regulatory intervention.

As longtime readers know, I’m often skeptical of this digital deification.

Services like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram aren’t really platforms: instead of providing core functionalities on which others can build a diversity of useful applications (the standard definition of a platform), they instead offer closed ecosystems in which they carefully monitor and control user behavior.

These services are also far from fundamental. Nothing about web teleology, for example, implies that Twitter’s arcane mix of short-message formats, ampersands, and retweet ratios is an unavoidable technological advance. If Jack Dorsey shut down his Frankenstein’s monster tomorrow, few would wake up a year from now really missing what it added to the online universe.

Recently, however, I’ve been grappling with the idea that there’s one immensely powerful social service about which my skepticism doesn’t seem to neatly apply. I’m talking about YouTube.

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One of the surprising lessons I learned working on Digital Minimalism is that when it comes to reforming your relationship with your devices, successful outcomes are less about deciding to stop harmful digital behaviors than they are about deciding to start committing to meaningful analog alternatives.

If you simply resolve to quit social media, and end up sitting on your coach, bored, white knuckling the urge to check Twitter, you’re unlikely to experience lasting change.

On the other hand, if you fill your life with hard but satisfying analog alternatives — activities that resonate with our primal urges to connect, to move, to reflect, to be surrounded by nature, to manipulate elements of the physical world with out hands — you’ll find the appeal of animated GIFs and ASCII snark to be greatly diminished.

With this in mind, I’m introducing the Analog January Challenge. It’s a collection of five commitments that last one month. They’re designed to provide you a crash course introduction to the types of satisfying analog activities that will reduce the anxious attraction of your screens.

(Note: you don’t have to begin exactly on January 1st; just block off four weeks starting on whatever day in the month you initiate the challenge.)

Here are the five commitments that make up the Analog January Challenge:

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