About us
We’re NOT Luddites1 – we’ve made a good living from the tech industry (we teach small businesses how to build and manage their own web sites and online stores)… so we love technology.
We also love our smartphones, the internet, and artificial intelligence. Each has their place, along with the potential to provide significant benefits for businesses, individuals, and society – provided they are used responsibly.
We strongly believe in corporate responsibility and the use of ethicaltechnology2 (an approach that balances technology innovation with human well-being and social values), and that they need to be paramount in todays rapidly changing tech driven world. At this stage, it seems these institutional virtues are being ignored!
What’s gone wrong?
Unfortunately, as well as providing many benefits in communication and efficiency, technology (predominantly smartphones, social media and AI) has also had the negative effect of shifting cognitive, social, and emotional patterns (of children and adults) through constant connectivity, and instant access to information.
It all started to go wrong around February (4th) 2004 the launch of *Facebook (or TheFacebook as it was known then) – followed by the launch of the iPhone in 2007 (29th June).
These were quickly accompanied by the introduction of more smartphones and social media platforms.
That’s not to say these new marvels of technology weren’t fantastic – they were! It is just that over the past 10-15 years what started out as social connection tools have become the exact opposite, and evolved simply into money making machines for their creators! (See this post.)
As well as the above, it seems that technology has also been hijacked by: criminals, paedophiles, liars, cheats, nutters, narcissists, conspiracy theorists, the angry, the greedy, the gullible, and of course – the stupid.
You’re not any of these are you?
How do you fix it?
You don’t need to be a genius to see that smartphone addiction, social media, and unregulatedartificial intelligence all pose a serious problem. Our advocacy efforts and programs will hopefully help… but will also take some effort on your part!
Our behavioral hack of leaning into the absurdity of your technology habits (we like to think of it as doomscrolling with a purpose🙂 involves regulary utilising the resources on this site (news posts, videos, research papers, free eBooks etc.) which will help you strip away the illusion that you are “keeping yourself informed and just connected to those you care about”, when you are in fact just “diving deeper down the rabbit hole”.
By adopting our techniques and procedures, you will be able to rethink your reliance on these intrusive little devices, and see life from a different (better:) perspective.
In Conclusion
By becoming an intentional user rather that a passive consumer, you can change your mindset as to how you interact with your smartphone and other technology, enabling you to boost your mental and physical health, as well as improve your personal relationships and social skills…
Start now before it’s too late!
References and Further Reading:
1: Luddites?
2 Corporate Responsibility?
3: Down the rabbit hole
4:
5:
*There were a number of earlier social media platforms; SixDegrees, launched 1997, Friendster in 2002, and MySpace in 2003, but it was FaceBook that really started the massive, rapid, and unstoppable surge of online attention, trends, and viral content.