Towards care-ful distraction: Digital well-being and a politics of care during pandemic lockdowns in the U.S

Jacob Saindon

Environment and Planning C, 2023, vol. 41, issue 8, 1575-1591

Abstract: This paper conceptualizes digital well-being during July of 2020 as an emergent, situated experience which was particularly influenced by the spatiotemporal conditions of lockdown and the affordances of digital platforms and technology. I take up two key heuristics of lockdown digital well-being—attention and intimacy—and draw upon feminist political geography to examine the alignments between attentional and intimate practices by means of digital technology during lockdown. Through four in-depth interviews conducted during this time, I focus on the connections between participants’ political intimacies, emotional geographies, and (self-)care practices. The paper identifies a disconnect between experiences of unwell-being and practices of (self-)care emerging from popular conceptions of digital well-being, specifically regarding practices of ‘doomscrolling.’ Drawing upon Sarah Atkinson’s (2011) work on the discontinuities between scales of care and responsibility, I argue for a reworking of discourses and practices of digital well-being through care-ful distraction: the unruly use of our increasingly co-constituted attentional capacities and intimate relations to practice care within, and for, the sociotechnical systems which bind us together.

Keywords: Digital well-being; intimacy; attention; care; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:41:y:2023:i:8:p:1575-1591

DOI: 10.1177/23996544231177821

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