The IDEA – Find the media balance that is healthy for you!
We love digital media. They enable communication with you and being in contact with everybody around the globe. Digital media and devices simplify our lives, taking more and more tasks off our shoulders: They navigate us past traffic jams to our destination; we learn what the weather is going to be like, and we can order things promptly. We appreciate that, and we appreciate our freedom, which we do not want to lose.
But let’s be honest: Are you still able to do without your media devices? Are you free to choose? To what extent are you able to exist in the here and now without being permanently available?
Do you feel stressed by media communication from time to time? Is it impinging on your sleep? Media fasting helps preserve your freedom and self-determination!
During media fasting, participants refrain from using all or some parts of digital media. You establish your own fasting rules and are your own judge.
Are you able to keep fasting together with your media fasting fellows? Seize the opportunity of making a fresh start at the end of the fasting period: What are my goals? When dealing with social media, how can I achieve that it is ME who decides what is happening when?
Find your own media balance. We offer various projects to support you!
The project video is currently in progress.
Here you can see a video of the two initiators at the conference "Future of Childhood".
This clip was created at the working meeting of the Lifestyle Initiative in autumn 2018: www.lebens-weise.org
In the context of an expert conference with over 50 experts from the fields of medicine, education, economics, psychology, media sciences as well as therapists and students of various disciplines, the topic of childhood in times of digitalisation was identified as the area in which there is an urgent need for action so that children can grow up healthy.
DigitalVegan:
Keep your mind and the world clean, fresh and beautiful.
This Website and the idea of digitalvegan.org was born when I read an article about Greta Thunberg and realized that our action www.medienfasten.org was not only important for human development but also for the environment: our carbon footprint is highly influenced by the way we use digital media.
I am not a strict vegan and I do not believe everyone should be vegan – but I do believe we could all become digital vegans and thereby make a significant contribution to our own health and the health of our planet.”
The digital industry is responsible for about 16% of our use of energy – and is the fastest growing industry in the world.
Each E-Mail, each voice message, and, especially each sending of photos, streaming of videos and playing of graphic-heavy video games has its carbon footprint.
We first wanted to make this website very fancy and full of videos – but then realized it needed to be simple to be ecological.
Our message is simple: we love digitalization and believe it can contribute to a peaceful, healthy world and to spiritual development. But we also see the dangers for ourselves, our children and our environment. We need to exercise freedom.
Therefore we inaugurated www.MedienFasten.org and www.DigitalVegan.org: if we could develop a culture in which it would be normal for all people on earth to, for example, be digitally abstinent one day per week and in fasting times, this would have a huge impact on personal and global health: more time for children and less CO2 emission.
Being a DigitalVegan means being aware of the impact of my use of digitalization on my personal, social and ecological environment and guiding my actions accordingly.
We first wanted to do a video with Greta Thunberg but then realized that it would be more environmentally friendly to just send her message:
Dear Greta,
in our ThinkTank Future of Childhood we asked ourselves: “What is the most important thing we should be doing NOW for the future of childhood?” The theme that emerged was digitalization: Be they for or against digital media in childhood, all experts agree that children are, on average, spending too much time in front of screens. Yet the tendency is still increasing. So we inaugurated www.MedienFasten.org and designed a media fasting calender which is now being piloted with 1500 families in a study in cooperation with the German Associations of Pediatricians and several schools.
Reading about you, we suddenly realized, that MedienFasten could be a means for children, youth and whole families to have a direct impact on the environment: imagine if all the children who go on demos with you around the world decided to restrain from watching videos and playing computer games from now until Easter (the fasting time) and thereafter on every Sunday. The effect on the environment would be huge. The digital industry is the industry with the fastest growing impact on the environment.
So perhaps we can join forces – for clean minds in a clean world.
Warm regards
David Martin and Silke Schwarz
Prof. Dr. med. David Martin and Dr. med. Silke Schwarz
www.medienfasten.org
Do you have any questions, ideas or suggestions, and would you like to get involved?
Please get in touch with us!
Dr. med. Silke Schwarz and Univ.-Prof. Dr. med. David Martin
Contact: silke.schwarz@uni-wh.de
