Looking after your digital wellbeing in lockdown

Ahead of our latest free online course on Digital Wellbeing which starts on 11th May, one of the course facilitators, Alice Bennett takes a look at the challenge of maintaining our digital wellbeing under lockdown...

If you are a fan of MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses – you might know that some of us here in the Library and IT have been involved in creating a few of them, one of which is on digital wellbeing. We update it each time we run it, to make sure it covers current issues but when we were preparing to run it again this year, something big happened: a pandemic.

Does this affect your teaching if your teaching was always going to be online? Well, it certainly does if your course is about digital wellbeing! With life in lockdown, working from home and studying remotely have become the new routine for the majority, social media and video calling are the primary means of staying connected and whether streaming or gaming, the digital dominates entertainment too.

Looking over our previous course materials, there was suddenly a very big, very virus-y hole. We talked about tech in the workplace – workplaces that are now closed. We discussed how not to annoy colleagues with emails but made no mention of videoconferencing. We talked about unhelpful comparisons on social media, but hadn’t mentioned comparing lockdown sourdough loaves. Everything was still current, but also somehow very out of date. This course has a global audience and we try to talk about trends rather than specifics, but this was a global event. We had to acknowledge the elephant that had suddenly waltzed into the room.

But what about overload? The pandemic is dominating our lives, so we can’t ignore it, but we didn’t want it to dominate this course. We couldn’t talk about digital wellbeing without mentioning something which pushed so much more of daily life online and has so heavily impacted wellbeing. On the other hand, continually staring the pandemic and its every digital ramification in the face was not the answer. Studying online is not necessarily escapism, but for most it is not about endlessly probing the worst of life’s problems either.

And we don’t know the whole story yet. We can talk about digital trends and habits, we can look at how lockdown has changed our behaviours, we can consider how we are using digital technology to combat the virus – but long term, we still don’t know what impact this will have on our digital world and our relationship with it. It may change habits, or people may revert to pre pandemic behaviours – we won’t know for some time what legacy we have been left.

So with this latest run of the course we have tried to strike a balance. We discuss the big digital issues and the immediate ones. If, like me, you have participated in more video conferences in the past few weeks than in the entirety of your life before 2020, we have tips on video calls and working from home, as well as discussing the risk of being always on when working remotely. With so many of us spending more time online during lockdown – whether through choice or necessity – understanding the way we interact with digital technology is even more important. There are risks and unresolved problems with our relationships with the digital world, but similarly there are amazing possibilities. So join us to consider the pitfalls and potentials of digital technology and the impact on our wellbeing, at a time when negotiating our wellbeing and an increasingly online life are especially important.

The new run of our Digital Wellbeing course starts on Monday 11th May.