Digital well-being under pandemic conditions

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

Dennis, M.J. (TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology)

2021

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.

COVID-19
Digital well-being
Human flourishing
Pandemics

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c925d6d0-f9d6-4ff5-869b-a88f9f54d119

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-021-09584-0

1388-1957

Ethics and Information Technology, 23 (3), 435-445

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2021 M.J. Dennis