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For the day August 2 was announced on Detox Day. What is it about? It's a day meant for detox, literally, from social networks. From what we could understand it is an initiative created by Techlore and by the youtuber iamLucid (Piped links).
Techlore it's a website (with also a Youtube channel (Piped links)) very important and interesting which regularly deals with the topic of privacy and security.
One of the projects of Techlore And Plexus, a site that many of you may already know. Plexus it is a large archive to understand whether or not an application works without Google services such as, for example, smartphone with the operating system /And/. The list is automatically updated by anyone through GitHub and it is very useful for those who dream of a cell phone degoogled.
Let's get back to the main topic though, later we will also explain why we believe it is useful Detox Day, in the meantime we will explain what it is and how to participate.
How to participate in Detox Day
- Group all the social applications you have on your mobile phone in a folder and call the folder “Detox Day“;
- Move the folder as far away from your smartphone's home page as possible so as not to give in to any temptation;
- Don't open that folder for at least 24 hours.
The benefits of this operation, according to the authors, are multiple:
- Be free. Algorithms are made to make you dependent on (their) maximum profit. Reconnect with the people in your life face to face. Reclaim your time: Relax and find a fun activity you've been wanting to try.
- Be happy. Be aware and introspective, become in tune with who you are. Stop comparing yourself to others. Don't continually look for external confirmation.
- Regain control. Stop surveillance capitalism. Protect your private data and personal information. Avoid the unwanted influence of big tech.
Invite people around you or who you only know virtually to participate. Send them a text message (or whatever you like) saying: “detox.earth” and uses the hashtag #nosocialday on social media these days.
Why participate in Detox Day?
We find the term detox, or detoxifying, particularly apt. According to some studies 1 2 Indeed excessive use of social networks is comparable to drug addiction: “similar to drug addicts, excessive social networking site users show a preoccupation with social media platforms when not using them, mood modification when accessing these sites, and tolerance of social rewards obtained on these sites from interactions“.
To make it clear how important it is dependency of likes on our brain we also mention this interesting study where it is discovered that: "(…) the higher people scored in the Facebook addiction survey, the more likely they were to quickly hit the button when viewing Facebook images compared to neutral images. Similarly, participants were more likely to mistakenly press the button when they saw a Facebook logo compared to a neutral street sign. In essence, Facebook signals were much more powerful triggers in people's brains than road signs“. 3
In short, there are many reasons why participate in Detox Day. You can take this as an opportunity to abandon them completely and try to use social networks that do not base everything on profit but on human beings such as Mastodon, PixelFed or PeerTube.
Last curiosity
Small curiosity that we discovered by viewing the site detox.earth. The website was in fact built by d3ward who we have already known to be one of the main developers of the Browsers Open source Kiwi.
- Beware of "facebook addiction"[↩]
- New Study Suggests Excessive Social Media Use Is Comparable To Drug Addiction[↩]
- What Facebook Addiction Looks Like in the Brain[↩]
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