A behavioral scientist explores love, belongingness, and fulfillment, focusing on how modern technology can both help and hinder our need to connect. A Next Big Idea Club nominee. Millions of people around the world are not getting the physical, emotional, and intellectual intimacy they crave. Through the wonders of modern technology, we are connecting with more people more often than ever before, but are these connections what we long for? Pandemic isolation has made us even more alone. In Out of Touch, Professor of Psychology Michelle Drouin investigates what she calls our intimacy famine, exploring love, belongingness, and fulfillment and considering why relationships carried out on technological platforms may leave us starving for physical connection. Drouin puts it this way: when most of our interactions are through social media, we are taking tiny hits of dopamine rather than the huge shots of oxytocin that an intimate in-person relationship would provide. Drouin explains that intimacy is not just sex—although of course sex is an important part of intimacy. But how important? Drouin reports on surveys that millennials (perhaps distracted by constant Tinder-swiping) have less sex than previous generations. She discusses pandemic puppies, professional cuddlers, the importance of touch, “desire discrepancy” in marriage, and the value of friendships. Online dating, she suggests, might give users too many options; and the internet facilitates “infidelity-related behaviors.” Some technological advances will help us develop and maintain intimate relationships—our phones, for example, can be bridges to emotional support. Some, on the other hand, might leave us out of touch. Drouin explores both of these possibilities.

This evidence-based, user-friendly guide presents a 30-day digital detox plan that will help you set boundaries with your phone and live a more joyful and fulfilling life. “I wrote The Anxious Generation to help adults improve the lives of children. Many readers have asked me for a version of the book aimed at helping adults and teens help themselves. Catherine Price has written the best such book.”—Jonathan Haidt Do you feel addicted to your phone? Do you frequently pick it up “just to check,” only to look up forty-five minutes later wondering where the time has gone? Does social media make you anxious? Have you tried to spend less time mindlessly scrolling—and failed? If so, this book is your solution. Award-winning health and science journalist and TED speaker Catherine Price presents a practical, evidence-based 30-day digital detox plan that will help you break up—and then make up—with your phone. The goal: better mental health, improved screen-life balance, and a long-term relationship with technology that feels good. This engaging, user-friendly guide explains how our smartphones and apps are designed to be addictive and how the time we spend on them is increasing our anxiety and damaging our abilities to focus, think deeply, form new memories, generate ideas, and be present in our most important relationships. Next, it walks you through an effective and easy-to-follow 30-day plan that has already helped thousands of people worldwide break their phone addictions and feel more fully alive. Whether you need help for yourself or for your family, friends, students, colleagues, clients, or community, How to Break Up with Your Phone is the ultimate guide to digital detoxing. It’s guaranteed to help you put down your phone—and come back to life.

Statistic show that the number of unmarried women in the US has now surpassed the number of married women, and many single men are duly frustrated that the women theyre meeting are just not that into them. But theres hope for the 100 million singles who are looking for the true connection. Meet to Marry founder and dating coach Bari Lyman discovered the common link that keeps most people from happily ever after. In Meet to marry, Lyman shares her time-tested method and revolutionary advice to finding wedded bliss. Using her Assess, Attract and Act approach to dating, she shows readers how, by changing their mind-set and removing their blind spots, they will reap a relationship match that takes them from being single to the alter.

Has the cell phone forever changed the way people communicate? The mobile phone is used for "real time coordination while on the run, adolescents use it to manage their freedom, and teens "text to each other day and night. The mobile phone is more than a simple technical innovation or social fad, more than just an intrusion on polite society. This book, based on world-wide research involving tens of thousands of interviews and contextual observations, looks into the impact of the phone on our daily lives. The mobile phone has fundamentally affected our accessibility, safety and security, coordination of social and business activities, and use of public places. Based on research conducted in dozens of countries, this insightful and entertaining book examines the once unexpected interaction between humans and cell phones, and between humans, period. The compelling discussion and projections about the future of the telephone should give designers everywhere a more informed practice and process, and provide researchers with new ideas to last years.*Rich Ling (an American working in Norway) is a prominent researcher, interviewed in the new technology article in the November 9 issue of the New York Times Magazine. *A particularly "good read", this book will be important to the designers, information designers, social psychologists, and others who will have an impact on the development of the new third generation of mobile telephones. *Carefully and wittily written by a senior research scientist at Telenor, Norway's largest telecommunications company, and developer of the first mobile telephone system that allowed for international roaming.

The present handbook provides an overview of the pragmatics of language and language use mediated by digital technologies. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is defined to include text-based interactive communication via the Internet, websites and other multimodal formats, and mobile communication. In addition to 'core' pragmatic and discourse-pragmatic phenomena the chapters cover pragmatically-focused research on types of CMC and pragmatic approaches to characteristic CMC phenomena.