Explore confronting phone addiction with digital minimalism, intentional social media usage, and Neil Postman's media theories. Embrace slow productivity inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien for a balanced approach to work and leisure.
Prioritize owning your artistic content online by establishing a controlled home base.
Balance intense deep work with mentally refreshing high-quality leisure activities for optimal productivity.
Deep dives
Monetizing Online Artwork and Maintaining Control
To monetize your artistic drawing skills online, it is crucial to have a home base that you control. Avoid relying solely on social media platforms, as they own and dictate how your content is displayed and sold. Instead, establish your own website or platform where you can showcase and sell your artwork. This ensures you have complete control over your creations and how they are marketed and sold. You can use social media tools to drive traffic and attention to your home base, but always maintain ownership and control of your artistic content.
Prioritizing Ownership and Control
When monetizing your art online, prioritize owning and controlling your content. Avoid relying solely on algorithmically-driven platforms where you are just a contributor. Instead, focus on building your own home base, such as a website, where you have full authority over your work and how it is presented and sold. Use social media platforms as promotional tools to direct people to your home base, but retain ownership and control over your art to ensure long-term sustainability and creative freedom.
Emphasizing Traditional Promotion Methods
When promoting your artwork online, consider the traditional methods used before the rise of social media. Look back to 2011 or earlier and study how artists, musicians, and writers gained attention for their work. Focus on building your skills, performing, networking with professionals, and creating a mailing list or audience outside of social media. While social media can be a supplementary tool, don't rely solely on it for exposure and success. By prioritizing traditional promotion methods, you can establish a stronger foundation for your online art career.
The influence of media technologies on culture and thinking
In the podcast episode, the speaker discusses the book 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neil Postman and highlights its deeper argument about the impact of media technologies on culture and thinking. The speaker explains that Postman's book goes beyond the portrayal of television as a negative influence and explores how media technologies, including TV, shape how we consume information and think about things. The speaker provides examples of media cultures throughout history, such as the newspaper culture during Abraham Lincoln's time and the impact of the printing press, to illustrate how different media forms affect our cognition. The speaker raises the question of how social media and smartphones are changing our thinking and urges listeners to ponder the profound effects of these new technologies.
Balancing deep work and high-quality leisure
The speaker addresses a question about balancing deep work and high-quality leisure activities. The speaker explains that the four-hour daily limit on deep work, as mentioned in the book 'Deep Work' by Cal Newport, is based on studies of intense and deliberate practice in fields like professional violin playing and extreme programming. While intense deep work can be mentally exhausting, the speaker emphasizes that high-quality leisure activities, unless they are similarly intense, typically do not exhaust us in the same way. The speaker advises listeners to engage in leisure activities that are less demanding and pull from different parts of the brain to balance out any mentally exhausting deep work. Furthermore, the speaker references Arnold Bennett's book 'How to Live on 24 Hours a Day' to highlight the idea that engaging in unrelated, high-quality leisure activities can actually reenergize the brain and provide a sense of relief from work-related demands.
We’ve become so used to our phones in our lives that we’ve stopped realizing how arbitrary and unusual the content we’re watching really has become. In this episode, Cal looks closer at what we’re really spending time doing on our phones, then provides step-by-step instructions for healing this relationship.
Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo
- What does Cal think about Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves To Death”? [28:35] - Can you pursue high quality leisure after a day filled with deep work? [33:14] - Can commercial breaks be used for high quality leisure? [37:24] - Will digital minimalism work in an age of augmented reality? [40:34] - How can a full time YouTuber practice digital minimalism? [46:53] -CALL: How to share content online? [52:38]
CASE STUDY: Cost-benefit analysis of technology usage [1:00:39]
CAL REACTS: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Search for Depth [1:06:43]
