New Delhi: Everyone seems to be in a “toxic relationship” with their devices as the line between work and home becomes blurrier than ever. A new book now offers strategies to help people reclaim their time, privacy and attention in the digital world, where a constant onslaught of information could be detrimental to one’s mental health.
‘The Art of Bitfulness: Keeping Calm in the Digital World‘ by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and author-coder Tanuj Bhojwani is all about ‘keeping calm’ in the internet age and creating healthy boundaries against the floodgate of content it offers.
Published by Penguin India, the book will be released on 19 May on Softcover, ThePrint’s online venue to launch non-fiction books.
Both authors are veterans of the digital world. While Nilekani is a Padma Bhushan awardee and former UIDAI chairman who featured twice in TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people, Bhojwani is an IIT graduate, whose training in the sciences has helped him in crafting narratives about technology.
According to the authors, the goal is not to “spend less time on your devices; it is to spend your time on your devices better”. The book also talks about how people got to this stage of over-indulgence with their devices in the first place and why technology limits, rather than liberate us.
“The line between work and home has become blurrier than ever. We all know this is not good for us. Yet, we can’t help ourselves from going back for one more scroll…This book talks about how we got here in the first place. Why does our technology limit us, rather than liberate us? The Art of Bitfulness offers a new way of building tech for all, rather than a winner-takes-all system,” the authors said.
Shrabonti Bagchi of HT Mint claims that unlike other books written about this “toxic relationship”, this one is different because it has been written by two people “who love technology very much and are fascinated by its power to do good — and yet, are cognizant of the ways in which technology can overwhelm us”.
“In this book… they (authors) dive into how this relationship developed and how it can be salvaged,” she added.
Also read: Ad-guru Alyque Padamsee leaves behind ‘commandments’ for present generation in new book