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Twitter and Tumblr Leaders Ditch Smartphones to Combat Addiction

Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post. — Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Marie Mawad and Cornelius Rahn

January 19, 2015, 4:15 PM UTCUpdated onJanuary 20, 2015, 10:24 AM UTC

From Arianna Huffington to strategists at Twitter Inc. and Tumblr, technocrats are taking a break from their smartphones to show they can survive without digital media -- for a few hours at least.

In interviews at the Digital Life Design technology conference in Munich this week, hyper-connected executives said they were plagued by the same sense of data overload, and dependency fears, as many of their customers.