Abstract
Increasing digital well-being is viewed as a key challenge for the tech industry, largely driven by the complaints of online users. Recently, the demands of NGOs and policy makers have further motivated major tech companies to devote practical attention to this topic. While initially their response has been to focus on limiting screentime, self-care app makers have long pursued an alternative agenda, one that assumes that certain kinds of screentime can have a role to play in actively improving our digital lives. This chapter examines whether there is a tension in the very idea of spending more time online to improve our digital well-being. First, I break down what I suggest can be usefully viewed as the character-based techniques that self-care apps currently employ to cultivate digital well-being. Second, I examine the new and pressing ethical issues that these techniques raise. Finally, I suggest that the current emphasis on reducing screentime to safeguard digital well-being could be supplemented by employing techniques from the self-care app industry.
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Notes
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Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube.
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In a recent article, Sullivan and Reiner claim that these pernicious effects include: ‘distracted driving, unfocused conversations, scarce opportunities for contemplation, etc.’ (2019, p. 2). The editors of this volume also recommend Peters et al. for a concise summary of the key literature on this topic (2018, pp. 1–2).
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Although monitoring screentime was once a specialised self-care app function, it is telling that it was incorporated into Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems in their updates of 2018.
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Although the Center for Humane Technology does not actively promote the use of online self-care apps, it is likely that they would grant a limited role to this kind of technology in improving our digital well-being. Harris is surely right to say that there is also a role for non-online self-care (turning one’s device off, covering it with a Faraday bag, etc.), but it would be foolish to think that we can improve all aspects of our digital well-being using these techniques, so there may be some role for online self-care. I return to this question in the final section.
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In January 2018, for example, Mark Zukerberg posted that his new year priority was ‘making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent’ (Zuckerberg 2018).
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Many everyday tasks are now impossible without access to the Internet. This has some luminaries in the tech industry calling the smartphone a ‘digital passport’, a term that both connotes the freedoms associated with Internet technology, while also capturing how our access to this realm is strictly conditional on having a device to access it.
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Even in this case, however, precisely because of its extra functionality, the risks involved in an invasion of privacy in a self-care app are far greater. The ease with which apps allows us to record our most intimate secrets, along with the sheer quantity of searchable data that it generates, means that it has a greater potential for moral harm if this data is compromised.
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I would like to thank the editors for their comments on the original manuscript and their insightful suggestions for further reading. This allowed me to significantly strengthen key ideas in the chapter. I would also like to thank Prof. James Arthur and Prof. Kristján Kristjánsson from the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtue for the invitation to discuss the topic of this chapter for at the Centre’s seminar in July 2019.
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Dennis, M.J. (2020). Cultivating Digital Well-Being and the Rise of Self-Care Apps. In: Burr, C., Floridi, L. (eds) Ethics of Digital Well-Being. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 140. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50585-1_6
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