Book: Reboot

About Reboot

Technology affects every interaction, shapes our identities and constantly hijacks our attention. So how can we reclaim our power and feel less helpless at every stage of our lives?

In a world full of algorithms, addictive apps and data-driven adverts, it often feels as if the digital environment is determining our behaviour. We trace our steps, track our kids and share our lives online, without really knowing whether this technology is serving our best interests – or those of the people we love.

We speak as though technology is a powerful, unstoppable force and we are the victims. ‘What is this technology doing to us?’ we ask. But are we as helpless as we assume?

In Reboot, leading psychotherapist, Counselling Psychologist and cyberpsychologist Elaine Kasket offers a novel approach to understanding technology’s role at every stage of our lives. Journeying from digital gestation to the digital afterlife, through infancy, adolescence and adulthood, Kasket connects the dots between our technology usage and the challenges it poses to our identity and development, and to our relationships and privacy.

Via discussions of ‘sharenting’, surveillance and social media, Kasket reveals how we consistently underestimate our power to shape our relationships with and through technology. She invites us to question the auto-pilot approach that many of us adopt and instead move forward in a more deliberate, mindful and empowered way.

Come away curious about why you use technology the way you do, clear about how those choices are really working out and with the tools to reclaim your life in a tech-obsessed world.

Buy the book:

  • 'A critical reminder that, at every stage of life, we get to choose our relationship with technology – and our choices shape our humanity. Kasket’s book is a roadmap filled with generous possibilities.'

    Luke Burgis — Author of Wanting

  • 'There are few wiser guides to our digital era than Elaine Kasket, and in Reboot she once again leads us deftly through a technological landscape of both opportunity and unsuspected peril. From birth to death – and beyond – Kasket lays out how technology is transforming every stage of our lives, and exposes some of the lurking dangers while resisting both alarmist doomsaying and breathless techno-optimism. Kasket brings both decades of therapeutic experience and an irrepressible curiosity to the task. Witty, bracingly honest, deeply humane and piercingly insightful, Reboot is both a call to take back our digital agency and an empowering toolkit for helping us to do so.'

    Patrick Stokes — Author of Digital Souls

  • 'Digital technologies aren’t just transforming every area of life. They’re transforming us, and this book, examining the psychological, social and technological intersections of this transformation, couldn’t be more timely.'

    Catherine Mayer — Author of Good Grief

  • 'Kasket has the ability to illustrate complex research areas through engaging, human stories that often reach all the way into your heart. As a recent parent, this book really made me reevaluate the way I use technology around my family. This is undoubtedly one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read this year.'

    Carl Öhman — Author of The Afterlife of Data