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 Everything was still current, but also somehow very out of date.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.

Wellbeing in the digital world

As well as it being Libraries Week 2019 (with its theme of libraries in a digital world), today is also World Mental Health Day. To mark this, Susan Halfpenny takes a look at the topic of Digital Wellbeing and shares some of her approaches to switching off...

Once upon a time, there was a world before our own: a land where the internet didn’t exist. It was a magical place... of playing outdoors, looking up information in books, visiting the library! An age when you didn’t know everybody’s bad opinions on every topic; where meeting people actually involved going to a physical place! That fabled land is a fading memory. Now it’s hard to go a day without using digital technologies. In this new and confusing world, we can barely tell fact from fairytale. Trolls no-longer simply hide under bridges, while big bad wolves keep their big big eyes on us, recording our every action. Has something got lost in this digital forest? Have we traded the prospect of a happy ending for a handful of magic beans?

Sometimes in our modern society it can feel like we are more present in the digital spaces than we are in the physical world. All the interconnectedness of technology with our everyday activities has made a lot of processes easier but it can also result in us feeling ‘always on’. This inability to switch off can have a negative impact on our wellbeing. It is therefore important that we develop the skills that will enable us to use applications effectively, critically evaluate the information we consume, and manage our online/offline balance.

Digital Wellbeing

Digital wellbeing is “the capacity to look after personal health, safety, relationships and work-life balance in digital setting” (Jisc, 2015). For us to effectively manage our digital wellbeing we require the skills to manage digital overload and distraction, protect our personal data, and engage responsibly online. We need to act with concern for the human and natural environment when using digital technologies. To improve digital wellbeing we need to balance developing ICT skills with critical evaluation and interpersonal skills. To enable us to make informed and critical decisions about the impact of digital technologies on our wellbeing we need to reflect and consider if these technologies have an impact on our emotions, relationships, and sense of self. We will all have different ideas about how much time we spend online is right for us and which tools help or hinder our wellbeing. There is no right or wrong. What we need to do when considering our digital wellbeing is identify what works for us as individuals. Once we have this figured out we can look to how our actions can impact others and ensure we are behaving in a socially responsible way.

Switch off or burn out

Managing your online/offline balance is not always an easy task and sometimes we can feel overwhelmed by email, messages, notifications and alerts. These digital distractions can seep into all areas of our lives, making us feel pressured to respond; drawing our attention away from activities we are undertaking in the real world. In the following video, from our Digital Wellbeing course, I explore some of the ways I have struggled with digital distractions which caused stress and anxiety — making me feel I was ‘always on’.

Here are some useful features, tools and tips that I identified when I was trying to address my work-life balance and ‘switch off’:

1. Turn off your alerts: getting alerts at all times of the day can be stressful and distracting. You can use the Do not disturb function on your Apple or Android device to switch off alerts from all apps. If you want to manage this on an app-by-app basis then you can do this in the settings. We provide guidance on how to turn off alerts for different operating systems on our digital wellbeing page.
2. Make a quick note: when you have an idea or remember something you need to do, note it down somewhere to look at later. You could use a non-tech method like a post-it or notepad or a tech solution like Google Keep. The Keep mobile app has voice recognition, so you can speak the idea into your phone and it’ll take a written note that can be picked up later.
3. Send less email: research has found that, on average, people spend a third of their time at work — and half the time they're working at home — reading and responding to emails. All this time dedicated to emails can result in increased workload and stress. Take a look at our effective email guidance for hints and tips for email management.
4. No phones rule: identify time when you won’t look at your phone. You might find it useful to have no phones in the bedroom so you can go to sleep and wake up without the distraction of technology, or no phones at dinnertime to encourage interactions with your family or housemates.
5. 15 minute rule: when you get home, for the first 15 minutes do something that will take your mind off work and make you happy! If straight after the working day doesn’t work for you, pick a different time that does. This is a technique picked up from readings of positive psychology and mindfulness. The Action for Happiness website provides useful tips and activities that you could consider using for your 15 minutes.

As previously mentioned, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution when it comes to digital wellbeing. One person’s positive can be another person's negative. It’s all about taking the time to reflect and think about what works for your wellbeing.

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If you're interested in finding out more about the topic of digital wellbeing, we're running a free three-week-long online course which starts on 21st October. We'll be exploring the concepts of health, relationships and society in the digital age, and we'd love to see you there!

Digital Creativity: telling new and old stories with technology

It's Libraries Week 2019, and this year's theme is libraries in a digital world. Over the course of the week we'll be doing a few things to celebrate this, including a Digital Creativity Showcase on Wednesday afternoon, and an open lecture on Digital Wellbeing on Wednesday evening. First, to get us in the mood, Siobhan Dunlop explores what it means to be digitally creative...

Historical words for beer drinking in the Yorkshire Historical Dictionary... Virtual reality experiences that show some of the less loved parts of the University of York campus in new lights... The sound of a beating heart. Getting hands on with old records, chapbooks, newspapers, and maps. Art made from code... Completely random things made from code. The ideas of Brian Eno... Cleaning data... The 12 days of Christmas turned into an augmented reality orchestra...

What do these have in common? They’re all things that have come into our digital creativity work, from two week-long events for students to inspiration for new training sessions and standalone showcases.

What is 'digital creativity'?

As we’ve defined it, ‘digital creativity’ is about using digital tools and technologies to explore creative ideas and to find new ways to display ideas, research, and work. In practice, this means trying out innovative tools and different creative approaches not only with digital media, but with data, historical materials, and anything else we can think of!

As an area, research has been done around ‘digital creativity’ as it relates to various aspects of creativity and digital technology. There’s a journal of the same name that proclaims to be ‘at the intersection of the creative arts, design, and digital technologies’ (Aims and scope, Digital Creativity), and the Digital Creativity Labs is a centre for research in games and interactive media. If you search online for ‘digital creativity’, one result is a page on Quora.com that claims the term is ‘outdated’ because ‘all media now digital’.

Maybe most media is now digital in some way, either in its creation or how we interact with and consume it, but ‘digital creativity’ in practice can be a way of focusing on being creative in new and different ways, utilising the power of technology to open up new ways of thinking and new juxtapositions. In turn, this can bring ideas, stories, and research to new audiences, as we found when running our Digital Creativity Week.

What is Digital Creativity Week?

In Information Services at the University of York, we’ve run our Digital Creativity Week twice now. During the week, a group of students work with IT professionals, librarians, and archivists to explore material related to a theme, learn how to use a range of digital tools in workshops, and work together to create final exhibition pieces that relate to both the theme and the digital tools used during the week. Armed not only with laptops and tablets but also notebooks and pens, it is a chance to be creative outside the usual confines of an academic discipline or project.

In 2018, the focus was on the Yorkshire Historical Dictionary data: the students explored the words in the dictionary, learnt about cleaning up the data, and worked with image editing, audio editing, and coding visualisations with Processing to bring certain words and ideas to life. Their final creation was a presentation in the 3Sixty space at York, which projects onto four screens to create an immersive experience. It was combined with augmented reality trigger images that added word definitions and other media to the show. Each student took their own inspiration from different parts of the dictionary to create a section of the presentation, ranging from words linking to war, the home, and the alehouse to a look at immigration to the area. Their final piece can be viewed in a widescreen version below:

In 2019, the week ran again, with more students and a wider theme: Yorkshire. The students visited York Minster Library and the Borthwick Institute for Archives to get hands on with material relating to the region and consider their relation to it. Workshops on audio, images, and coding were interspersed with creative prompts and the chance to try out VR and see live music coding.

This time, the exhibition broke free of a single space and took over the Harry Fairhurst building in the library, where the students created exhibition rooms for attendees to visit and experience their visions of Yorkshire and its past and present. The event contained reflections on the fragility of history and missing data, a look right at the heart of Yorkshire, and pieces considering the continuity of York despite all the change that has taken place. A selection of the final exhibition pieces can be viewed on our Digital Creativity site.

How can we all be digitally creative?

Digital creativity isn’t something confined either to week-long events, or to people who work with technology. It is about experimenting with new tools and ideas, combining material in unexpected ways, and finding the digital technologies that can help you be creative or express your creativity. To conclude this post, here are some suggestions for being digitally creative:

1. Try out new free tools. Our site of digital creativity tools might give you inspiration and it has a Random Digital Creativity Generator if you’d like some help starting off (refresh that page for a new set of suggestions).
2. Explore historical material. Part of digital creativity is about working with material and research in new ways, so why not explore the collections discussed on this blog and the Borthwick Institute for Archives blog.
3. Use a notebook. Doesn’t sound very digital, but you shouldn’t doubt the notebook. During Digital Creativity Week each student has a notebook to fill with their ideas, thoughts, doodles, and notes. These can be photographed and digitally manipulated or be used to spark off ideas for soundscapes, videos, and more.
4. Fail better. Remove any expectations of what you must create and instead aim for something that is completely new to you, even if it’s not what you intended to make. Try out glitch tools to embrace the bizarre or give yourself arbitrary constraints on your piece to see which direction that sends you in.
5. Have fun. You don’t have to set out to create something beautiful or learn a new skill. You never know what you might do with a spare 5 minutes!

If you're interested in finding out more, or getting a little more inspiration, feel free to drop in on our Digital Creativity Showcase in LFA/144 (Fairhurst first floor), from 14:30-16:00 on Wednesday 9th October.