Digital Detox in Corporate Culture - Realistic or Impossible?
The corporate world has necessitated the need for humans to walk around with the sum total of all human information and a war-monger-er within their pockets. The emphasis has always been on the importance of these devices, these platforms, and technology in general. What would corporations have to gain from setting up a facade that justifies their existence and allows them to exploit the smaller fish in the sea? The normalization of corporate employees to be around digital outlets allows other corporations to do what corporations do best. Capitalize. An ounce of conditioning, a pinch of psychological manipulation using emotions such as fear of missing out, and a few spoonfuls of algorithms that are trained to predict human response is all it takes to create a digital hellscape. People look towards digital detox as a potential savior. If too much information being thrown at them is desensitizing them, then they might as well not look at those things and try to find beauty in life. In a corporate setting, a timeout for electronic devices comes at the expense of job security. This leads to people formulating different variations of the digital detox formula that works for them. However, we might need to step back and ask whether we are looking at the problems the right way. This is where the concept of "the premise of idiots" comes into play. When we accept social media, the constant influx of messages and updates through instant messaging, the updates about innocent lives being bombed and then debated upon, as cultural norms, that we have to escape, we play on the premise set by the corporations fighting for our attention. The way to fight attempts at desensitization is to learn the weight of emotions, it is to break out of the premise of idiots and acknowledge that the problem is the existence of the industry itself.