Digital well-being is often reduced to a personal battle against addictive apps and distracting notifications, but this project argues that framing is itself the problem. The research addresses a gap in understanding why digital well-being has become synonymous with individual self-control—a view that unfairly blames people for harms caused by profit-driven tech platforms and unequal social systems. While humanities scholars have criticised this "responsibilised" approach, little is known about how and why such ideas persist. The project will trace the concept's origins in psychology, computing, and politics, and track how it spreads through public media. If successful, the work could shift how policymakers, designers, and the public think about digital well-being—away from personal discipline and toward shared responsibility for the systems that shape technology use. It will produce new concepts and measurement tools for researchers, and, through a public exhibition in Sheffield, offer everyday people alternative ways to experience and practice digital well-being that do not hinge on control.
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Control Shift Escape will provide new ways to understand, design for, and practice digital well-being today. Digital well-being is concerned with the complex and intersecting impacts of technology on the lived experience of human beings. Yet it is often reduced to controlling personal technological habits: resisting addictive designs, managing the psychological risks of social media, interpreting AI deep-fakes, and balancing the attentive drain of always-available work and social cultures. Relative experiences of digital well-being are thus frequently measured against, and correlated with, an individual’s ability to stay in technological control, or not. Cultural studies scholars have critiqued this focus on digital self-discipline as a new form of neoliberal responsibilization - making individuals responsible for managing the harms caused by deregulated and marketised social systems. Overall, the responsibilized view 1) unfairly blames individuals for decreased digital well-being, and 2) separates digital well-being from its situated socio-technical context - namely as it relates to the social determinants of health, issues of identity, material inequalities, or the capitalist platform environments it manifests within. Dominant accounts of digital well-being as self-control, then, are politically, epistemologically, and empirically limited. However, while its damaging effects have been made clear by humanities scholars, how and why such ideas persist, and even where they come from, remains little understood. Control Shift Escape seeks to address this gap and instead contribute a new way of understanding, designing for and practicing digital well-being through three key aims: Aim 1: To explore the current discursive shape, political limits and public spread of digital well-being as control. Aim 2: To construct original concepts, measurements, and designs for digital well-being. Aim 3: To provide new ways for public audiences to understand and practice digital well-being today. Control. Objective 1 is to better understand how and why digital well-being has come to be correlated with user-control. This will be achieved by examining the dominant psychological, computational and political literatures through which digital well-being is currently researched, discussed and designed, as well as how this spreads in public media domains. Shift. Objective 2 is to produce new concepts, measurements and designs that can study and approach digital well-being as a situated socio-technical phenomenon. First, the project will synthesise previously separate philosophies of technology and well-being to create original conceptualizations of digital well-being. Second, it will cultivate new networks of interdisciplinary scholars that can collectively develop new ways to measure and design for digital well-being in the future. Escape. Objective 3 is to create original ways for public audiences to understand and practice digital well-being through arts-based research. It will do this by working with Bloc Projects, a socially engaged arts charity in Sheffield, to commission an early career artist to create a free public exhibition and events programme in their gallery space and online, offering fresh ideas and practices of digital well-being for people to explore in an accessible way. Overall, this project will 1) provide a novel critical analysis of digital well-being as control, adding much needed theoretical depth and understanding to a pressing public issue, 2) generate new interdisciplinary scholarship by creating alternative concepts, measures, designs, and networks of digital well-being and 3) be publicly impactful by helping non-academic audiences reimagine what digital well-being means, and how it can be experienced and practiced, within our shared technological world.
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