Rough Definitions of Digital Wellness
In my last article, I discussed the future of digital wellness and how a collection of knowledge, attitudes, and actions will be helpful in defining the practice of being well online. What are the first steps we can take towards getting a better understanding of these things? What do they entail, and how do we go about seeking them?
It will be a slow process of trial and error to determine the best path forward. We live in an experimental age, so we will likely be experimenting our way into the next one.
In searching for this collection of things that will help our relationships to tech and our overall wellness, I want to make clear that I am not searching for *universal axioms* that can be applied across human experiences as an absolute truth. It would be a difficult application since our experiences are so highly personalized — think of the fine tuning on recommendation algorithms for a good example of this.
Instead, I want to try to look for what is most common and offer that as a first line of defense, a rough grouping rather than a rigid category. Our interactions with both the digital and our definitions of what it is to be well are highly personalized, and I intend to not overlook that nuance. Having a set of questions, a set of knowledge and attitudes to select from will be more helpful than handing down arbitrary absolutes from on high.
My personal definition of how digital wellness manifests in my life is that I feel better after using tech than before. This could mean watching a nice movie, writing a super cool Medium article, or texting my hottie boyfriend good night. Some examples of not feeling better after using tech include comparing myself to obscenely beautiful and successful people on social media, spiraling down a YouTube thread that i’m not even very invested in, or reading too many depressing news headlines.
This observation is limited to my own experimentation, but I want to posit that even though tech is geared toward quantity, most of my positive experiences stem from valuing quality over quantity. Note that my positive examples given were all singular and the negative interactions were multiples. I seem to always feel worse after doing too much of the same thing over and over, even if it’s something extremely gratifying and worthwhile, like looking at dank memes.
Perhaps a solid common ground to begin our digital wellness journey is the understanding that we are finite beings existing in an infinite space; our limited capacities just aren’t compatible with the sheer scale of the content at our disposal, and that discrepancy breeds discomfort.
The internet as it stands today is some form of democracy that i’m not well versed enough in political science to be able to accurately identify. We’re all making content and its popularity is by no means a measure of its quality, but it helps promote the quantity of times it appears.
Our interfaces are structured to push the popular content to the forefront. We lose sight of our own perspective on a piece of content by being overridden with a strong-armed opinion, promoting polarization and eliminating nuance. Part of developing our own conceptions of digital wellness will be honing our personal taste in quality and budgeting our time accordingly.
By focusing on quality over quantity, we can approach our digital interactions more mindfully. I would much rather look at 5 hilarious memes than 100 subpar ones, but the 100 subpar ones is a much more common experience. This shift in attitude could have the potential to restructure our internet experiences, honing our ability to determine quality in a shorter duration and judge whether a piece of content is worth our time BEFORE investing our attention in its substance.
This represents “cashing in” on the ability for human behavior to shape an algorithm, rather than the other way around. It’s important to acknowledge that the reverse is often the case, and expectations of this shift should be realistic.
I really wish it were as simple as consecutively happening across 5 of the dankest memes of your internet-soaked life and being so blissfully satisfied that you close Instagram within 15 minutes of opening it. It’s by far the exception rather than the rule, and we can only dream of such memetic accuracy.
For now, I will end with the reminder that this is a mere baby step down the long road of digital wellness, and even just acknowledging something like quality preferences is making progress. Your experience might differ wildly from these observations, and that’s a good thing. That means you’ve taken the first step of recognizing what digital wellness means for you. Keep going.
