The evidence isn’t just anecdotal: a 2016 report sponsored by the
National Institute of Mental Health and the National Cancer
Institute showed a significant association between social media use
and depression. But the machines need not win, say the authors of
forthcoming titles that aim to help readers manage their social
media practices and find creative ways to enjoy more time offline.
Technology consultant Tchiki Davis, in Outsmart Your Smartphone
(New Harbinger, Nov.), offers advice on using technology in ways
that promote happiness; psychologist Melanie Greenberg
contributes the foreword. Self-control isn’t
the problem, says Ryan Buresh, acquisitions
editor at New Harbinger: the most popular
apps are designed to keep users hooked.
“We don’t want to pathologize this,”
Buresh says. “This isn’t a tech detox. The
authors live in reality. You can’t throw your
phone in the ocean; you have to set
boundaries so that you’re not at the whim
of your phone.”
The idea of accepting the centrality of
digital culture but navigating it confidently
recurs in Keep Calm and Log On by Gillian
“Gus” Andrews (MIT, Apr. 2020). The
author, an information security expert,
draws on academic research in media
literacy, communications theory, and more,
translating it for a general audience and
giving tips on what she calls digital
mindfulness. “This book is a guide to living
through this digital revolution without get-
ting trampled,” she writes.
Broadcast journalist Celeste Headlee,
cohost of the new PBS program Retro Report,
implores readers in Do Nothing (Harmony,
Mar. 2020) to close the productivity apps
and stop seeking approval through filtered
photographs. She examines how software
designers exploit people’s fears of being left
out or left behind, and counters with steps
for going analog and taking the media out of
one’s social life. “A return to our own basic
humanity is overdue,” she writes. “It is now
a question not of preference, but of survival.”
The fear of missing out that Headlee
addresses resurfaces as its inverse in JOMO:
Celebrate the Joy of Missing Out by Jessica
Misener (Adams, Nov.), which embraces
the relief a person feels when a friend
cancels plans, providing an unexpected but
welcome excuse to stay in. Misener details
some 350 stress-free activities, most of them low-tech (hosting a
game night; teaching one’s pet a new trick), that are intended, she
writes, “to let your inner homebody run free.”
The point, says Brendan O’Neill, editor-in-chief at Adams
Media, is to avoid activities that may spark social envy. “Everyone
is constantly going, going, going,” he says. “JOMO gives everyone
permission to slow down, say no to plans, and still have fun.”
—J.K.Social Anxiety
28 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ OCTOBER 14, 2019