A lot of people have this background hum of anxiety that they've just become used to, this sort

of screen-focused life we have, in addition to taking us away from things that we know are better

for us to do and more meaningful and more fulfilling, is also screwing around with our brain chemistry.

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Today I'm very happy to have back on the show one of my favorite thinkers and writers about

the contemporary digital age, Cal Newport.

So Cal is well known as a computer science professor who also writes about the intersection

of technology and culture, one of my favorite all-time bloggers as well. His new book,

Digital Minimalism, is about the dangers of the distractions of social media. And that's what we're

going to talk about on today's show. But first, I just had to get his take on something that's

been on my mind, which is the drastic freefall in the last

few years of the quality of blogs, which long time listeners will know I'm a huge fan of.

So I had to ask him, what does because what's happening is you're in competition with lots of other interesting sources of information, and you really are only going to earn attention if you win that competition. So if you produce something that is interesting, there's an audience that likes it, you're the right person to say it, it's useful, it's well-constructed, you can earn attention to that market, and if you don't, you won't. No one will come. I think anyone who's experimented with blogs knows what that's like.

No comments, no visits. You stare at the Google Analytics chart and it's a flat line. We're losing the

patient. Social media did something interesting with this attention market. It upended it and added

what's more of a collectivist market. So if you think about the normal person's experience with something like Facebook or Instagram, there's this unspoken agreement you have with people you know, which is, you know, I'll put up something probably pretty banal, but you'll give it some attention. Maybe you'll like it or leave a comment, because I'll do the same for you. And we'll all sort of spread the attention around. So we no longer have to. We're no longer in a competition or only the interesting things get attention. Everyone gives a little bit attention to everyone else and then everyone can share in that experience of feeling like someone is paying attention to what I'm saying. So what I like to emphasize is if you took the content of a normal, let's say, Facebook wall and put it on a private domain blog, you would have no visitors. If you took the

standard Instagram account and put it on a private domain blog, no one's going to come see.

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