Digital Detox: Experience and Practices in Russia

Nowadays people’s life is becoming tightly connected to modern digital technologies and almost all its’ aspects in the 21st century are depended on the usage of gadgets, the Internet and Media. Due to various motives and goals some people start practicing the temporary abstinence of digital technology usage, known as digital detox. Even though this is a rather widespread practice, still modest number of scientific articles on digital detox exist, which indicates that researchers have not paid due attention to this topic. Research questions of this work are: 1) Why people start practicing digital detox in Russia? 2) What are the practices and experience of digital detoxers in Russia? 15 focused semi-structured online interviews were conducted with digital detox practicers from 11 Russian cities. Qualitative content analysis was chosen as a method of data analysis. Thus, 4 types of digital detox practices were elaborated - short-term, long-term, before / after sleep and digital detox in nature. The reasons to start practicing digital detox were divided into the pushing and pulling factors. Push factors include - spending too much time online, facing too much information, having too much of social comparison, health problems and feeling of addiction. Regaining offline communication is the only pulling factor to start digital detox. The stages of digital detox experience were also elaborated and compared to the stages of Transtheoretical model of health behavior change and model of digital detox by Morris and Pickens.