Abstract
Global lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic have offered many people first-hand experience of how their daily online activities threaten their digital well-being. This article begins by critically evaluating the current approaches to digital well-being offered by ethicists of technology, NGOs, and social media corporations. My aim is to explain why digital well-being needs to be reimagined within a new conceptual paradigm. After this, I lay the foundations for such an alternative approach, one that shows how current digital well-being initiatives can be designed in more insightful ways. This new conceptual framework aims to transform how philosophers of technology think about this topic, as well as offering social media corporations practical ways to design their technologies in ways that will improve the digital well-being of users.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a spike of concern about whether social media technologies (SMTs)1 undermine digital well-being (DWB).2 Since April 2020, large populations have spent their waking hours using SMTs to get news updates, communicate, and socialise online
Current initiatives to DWB follow this model in two ways: first, they concede that the use of SMTs can be detrimental when not moderated as part of a healthy online/offline balance; second, they propose that is should be tackled by consumer behaviour
The emergency lockdown measures required to contain COVID-19 provide a unique viewpoint on a future in which SMTs play an increasing role in our lives, as well as alerting us to how SMTs can impact upon DWB
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a spike of concern about whether social media technologies (SMTs) undermine digital well-being (DWB). Since April 2020, large populations have spent their waking hours using SMTs to get news updates, communicate, and socialise online. Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat each launched a ‘digital well-being page’ for their users that year, just as Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS were overhauled in ways that these companies claimed would prioritise DWB While each of these initiatives has merit, the first goal of this article is to show why thinking of DWB according to this corporate paradigm hobbles the radical approach which we need to reimagine DWB in a post-COVID world. NGOs such as the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), I contend, have adopted an invaginated version of the very same conception of DWB used by Google, Facebook, and their ilk Identifying what both corporate and NGO approaches have in common is a key step in reimagining DWB in ways that move beyond existing approaches. To examine NGOs, I explore the CHT, briefly comparing their method with that proposed by the American Academy of Pediatrics
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