(Re)Politicizing Digital Well-Being: Beyond User Engagements

TL;DR

This paper critiques the individual-focused approach to digital well-being, emphasizing its cultural, social, and political dimensions, and advocates for a broader, interdisciplinary perspective that considers societal inequalities and power relations.

Contribution

It challenges the universal proxy of user engagement for well-being, highlighting the importance of social and political contexts in digital well-being measurement.

Findings

Well-being is culturally specific and environmentally conditioned.

User engagement is an inadequate proxy for well-being.

Digital ill reflects social inequalities and power dynamics.

Abstract

The psychological costs of the attention economy are often considered through the binary of harmful design and healthy use, with digital well-being chiefly characterised as a matter of personal responsibility. This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the empirical, ideological, and political limits of embedding this individualised perspective in computational discourses and designs of digital well-being measurement. We will reveal well-being to be a culturally specific and environmentally conditioned concept and will problematize user engagement as a universal proxy for well-being. Instead, the contributing factors of user well-being will be located in environing social, cultural, and political conditions far beyond the control of individual users alone. In doing so, we hope to reinvigorate the issue of digital well-being measurement as a nexus point of political concern, through which multiple disciplines can study experiences of digital ill as symptomatic of wider social inequalities and (capitalist) relations of power.