Digital well-being under pandemic conditions: catalysing a theory of online flourishing

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has catalysed what may soon become a permanent digital transition in the domains of work, education, medicine, and leisure. This transition has also precipitated a spike in concern regarding our digital well-being. Prominent lobbying groups, such as the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), have responded to this concern. In April 2020, the CHT has offered a set of ‘Digital Well-Being Guidelines during the COVID-19 Pandemic.’ These guidelines offer a rule-based approach to digital well-being, one which aims to mitigate the effects of moving much of our lives online. The CHT’s guidelines follow much recent interest in digital well-being in the last decade. Ethicists of technology have recently argued that character-based strategies and redesigning of online architecture have the potential to promote the digital well-being of online technology users. In this article, I evaluate (1) the CHT’s rule-based approach, comparing it with (2) character-based strategies and (3) approaches to redesigning online architecture. I argue that all these approaches have some merit, but that each needs to contribute to an integrated approach to digital well-being in order to surmount the challenges of a post-COVID world in which we may well spend much of our lives online.

Personality Traits, Technology-Related Teaching Skills, and Coping Mechanisms as Antecedents of Teachers’ Job-Related Affective Well-Being and Burnout in Compulsory and Higher Education Online Teaching Settings

“…A previous study emphasizes that factors, such as the lack of technological knowledge ( La Paglia et al, 2008 ; Wang and Li, 2019 ) or problems experienced with the use of technology ( Al-Fudail and Mellar, 2008 ) contributed to an increased level of teachers’ stress. The pandemic has caused the need of integrating digital technologies into daily routines at an unprecedented rate ( Dennis, 2021 ) and different types of knowledge related to digital technology, instruction, and teaching content are assumed to be necessary for teachers when teaching with technology ( Mishra and Koehler, 2006 ). Technology-related teaching skills include identifying and using the appropriate technologies in a way that facilitates a broad range of learning activities relevant for students ( Chi and Wylie, 2014 ).…”

Digital well-being in an age of mobile connectivity: An introduction to the Special Issue

“…Taken together, the available conceptualizations of digital well-being highlight that the benefits of mobile connectivity, but also—and perhaps even more strongly—the burdens of mobile connectivity, are considered key features of contemporary “media life” (Deuze, 2011). Mobile media scholars are currently actively exploring these features, among others through the identification of novel concepts such as “messaging guilt” (Halfmann et al, 2021) and “availability stress” (Hall, Steele, et al, 2021).…”

“…Digital well-being is an emerging concept in the field of social sciences and humanities that garners attention from scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, including cultural studies (e.g., Beattie and Daubs, 2020), human-computer interaction (e.g., Monge Roffarello and De Russis, 2021), philosophy (e.g., Dennis, 2021), communication sciences (e.g., Vanden Abeele, 2021, sociology (e.g., Gui et al, 2017), and psychology (e.g., Dadischeck, 2021). Its scholarly use has grown exponentially over the past five years (see Figure 1).…”

Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on architectural education: bibliometric and content analyses

“…This situation has raised the interest of many researchers around the world, who have investigated it from various perspectives, such as exploring students' perception, satisfaction and evaluation of online learning (Peimani and Kamalipour, 2021b;Koh and Wong, 2021;Ceylan et al, 2021;Asadpour, 2021;Bakir and Alsaadani, 2022;Komarzy nska-Swie sciak et al, 2021;Alkhalil et al, 2021;Alnusairat et al, 2021;Elrawy and Abouelmagd, 2021); solving the challenges due to COVID-19 and proposing guidelines (Leon et al, 2021;G€ uler, 2022;Dennis, 2021); developing virtual reality (VR) approaches for education (Wu et al, 2021;Xi and Cong, 2022) and identifying facilitators and barriers for the adoption of online AE (Tandon et al, 2021). Most previous studies involved individual cases or a single country (e.g.…”

“…Milovanovi c et al (2020) illustrated how current pandemic challenges can be transformed into learning potential by a case study. Several other studies have described this viewpoint in architectural curricula(Ibrahim et al, 2021;Dennis, 2021) Leon et al (2021). explored improvement options in specific areas, such as BIM, whereas other scholars investigated this within the concept of case studies(Peimani and Kamalipour, 2021a;Xi and Cong, 2022).…”