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

Title of the Paper

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

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Measurement of digital well-being and its political, cultural, and social implications
• Keywords: Digital well-being, user engagement, measurement, time management, power relations, cultural embeddedness, user welfare, design ethics, structural inequality, multidisciplinary research

Research Background and Problem

• Problem Identified by the Authors: Digital well-being is often simplified as an issue of individual behavior and discussed through the binary lens of "healthy design" and "self-restraint." However, this approach neglects the complexity of how digital well-being is influenced by social, cultural, and political conditions.
• Importance: Current digital well-being design and measurement tools fail to comprehensively evaluate users' life contexts and the impact of social systems, potentially exacerbating existing inequalities and limiting actual improvements in user well-being.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: The authors critique the use of user engagement as a proxy indicator for digital well-being. They redefine the concept of "well-being" from multidisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, and social sciences, aiming to reveal its embeddedness and the limitations of related design norms.

Solution

• Proposed Methods or Solutions:
  1. Reexamining Well-Being from a Multidisciplinary Perspective: Integrating philosophy, psychology, and structural theories to redefine the concept of digital well-being.
  2. Critiquing Existing User Engagement Metrics: Highlighting how these metrics overlook socio-cultural factors beyond user behavior.
  3. Proposing New Design Frameworks: Incorporating value-sensitive design, participatory design, and other approaches to broadly include user contexts.
• Innovative Aspects: Expanding the discussion of digital well-being from narrow behaviorism and individual responsibility to encompass structural inequality and social justice.
• Implementation Steps and Techniques: Transitioning to politically sensitive design methods, focusing on the social, cultural, and economic contexts of user well-being; encouraging designers to collect user feedback through participatory technologies while avoiding invasive data collection.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes:
  1. Conceptual Reconstruction: Clarifying three models of well-being—eudaimonic well-being, hedonic well-being, and structural well-being—by distinguishing between health and well-being.
  2. Critique of Existing Metrics: Demonstrating how user engagement-based metrics fail to capture offline behaviors or individual social contexts.
  3. Proposed Design Pathways: Introducing novel digital well-being design frameworks, including harm reduction approaches, value-sensitive design, and participatory design.
• Advantages:
  • Establishing a strong connection between digital well-being and social structures, as well as cultural contexts.
  • Addressing neglected political and ethical dimensions in current designs.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • The proposed framework may face challenges in widespread implementation due to potential conflicts with capitalist-driven design ecosystems.
  • Future research should explore non-design approaches (i.e., choosing not to design when harm is inevitable) and develop cross-cultural, cross-regional well-being metrics.
  • Ethical challenges in balancing user privacy with design improvements must be addressed, while avoiding reliance on large-scale data collection.

Through this structured analysis, the paper advocates for shifting the focus of digital well-being from individual perspectives to structural and political dynamics, offering critical and socially participatory pathways for HCI researchers to design the next generation of technologies.