On the Rise of Digital Wellness
How can the technologies we use support healthy relationships by design?
Originally written for Cornell University’s Social Media Lab in Dec 2019.
In recent years, there’s been a lot of talk about tech companies doing bad things, specifically with regards to shipping “addictive” features designed to increase time spent on their platforms.
Obviously, this becomes an issue when people face serious health and safety repercussions from tech overuse, especially for vulnerable demographics who lack the digital literacy education to understand what a healthy relationship with technology should look like.
In these respects, it’s easy to lambast the employees of Company X for building and shipping a feature that becomes misused or overused. One could say, “the engineers should’ve thought more about ethics!” or, “the designers just care about pixels, not people!”
And while there is an onus for us to take accountability for when the tech we design fails people, there are also a lot of innovators taking up the mantle in advocating for more ethical practices.
This makes a lot of sense — even if you demonize a company for its negligence in privacy and misinformation, there are still tens of hundreds of employees — from starry-eyed new grads to veteran industry leaders — who work tirelessly to carve out a space for ethics by design.
One of the ways people are trying to do better is through digital wellness, an initiative to foster healthy, mindful relationships between people and tech.
What is Digital Wellness?
Digital wellness is about maintaining a healthy balance between life online and in the real world. This involves building an understanding of when technology is improving your life, versus distracting from it.
It’s an all-too-familiar feeling to mindlessly scroll through Instagram photos or descend down a clickhole of YouTube videos. This kind of behavior is actually fine every once in a while, but prolonged tech overuse can lead to addiction and physical and psychological dependency.
For things like social media, a study by Helion showed that overuse can lead to negative effects on wellbeing, quality of life, and physical health, which is exacerbated by rising tech addiction among at-risk demographics such as teens, according to a national survey.
For this reason, an important part of digital wellness is developing better discipline with regards to technology use. This can be mediated through better education on digital literacy, but tech companies have also been working on features to support better balance by design.
Here’s a few examples of companies investing in healthier relationships between their users and their tech:
Designers at Google have been leading an initiative for digital wellbeing, with an emphasis on reflection in personal relationships with tech. Some of their focus areas include unplugging more often, minimizing distractions from real life, and finding balance as a family.
Across platforms such as YouTube and Gmail, initiatives such as enabling users to opt in to screen time limitations are a means of controlling addictive behavior and reminding users to take a break from the online world.
Even if this seems contradictory to high-level metrics to increase time spent on the app, YouTube is thinking about users’ long-term wellbeing and taking proactive approaches to help them establish healthy relationships with their products. In a lot of ways, this is also smart for improving brand perception and customer satisfaction with the app.
For its Android platform, Google has also been exploring a suite of apps for managing time spent on your phone.
Apple
Likewise, Apple’s “Screen Time” analyzes the time users spend on their apps to generate a data visualization, with insights on things like individual time spent and how it compares to the national average.
Users can also set time limits for specific apps, and receive a notification when the time limit is about to expire. One important way Apple’s approach differs from Google’s is that it is more self-directed — although the user receives the notification for their time limit, they can opt to push it back for 15 minutes or dismiss it completely. In this way, it relies partially on the user to exercise prudence in managing their own screen time.
Forest
Aside from these initiatives, smaller startups and app developers have also recognized the need for digital wellness and executed on this through apps designed to encourage users to reduce their screen time.
Forest is a productivity app designed to curb tech dependence and benefit the environment for users’ control of their tech usage. Users cultivate a “virtual garden,” where staying in the app while you focus on other tasks supports the growth of trees in the garden, and navigating to other apps kills them.
Forest provides a system of virtual currency that rewards good behavior, and is used towards planting real trees in countries such as Senegal, Cameroon, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, in associated with the nonprofit Trees for the Future (learn more about this here).
The app essentially plays on gamification and environmental consciousness to encourage users to take time away from their phones back into the real world.
This approach of incentivizing productivity has generally been well-received, though some argue that it introduces anxiety over the death of the fake trees and that the virtual currency rewards are too small to be incentivizing. Regardless, the rise of such productivity apps bring awareness and attention to the need for better, healthier relationships with technology.
Beyond Screen Time
Digital wellness is holistically about fostering a healthy relationship with the technologies we use in our everyday lives. While a lot of this might deal with time spent, there are also additional factors, such as how you act online, how you interact with groups, and the digital footprint you leave. These contribute deeply to our psychological and emotional wellbeing, especially as our online and real-life worlds become inextricably intertwined.
People love to badmouth tech companies for the bad things they do (which, of course, is definitely a thing), but it’s also good to take an optimistic approach and recognize the hard work technologists have been doing to improve the ethics behind human-computer interactions.
At the end of the day, there are a lot of people in tech who deeply care about ethics and designing systems to be used in healthy ways — and with growing awareness of digital wellness, we can hope to see more of these initiatives take flight in the technologies we use day to day.
