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

Author:

Saindon Jacob1ORCID

Affiliation:

1. University of Kentucky, USA

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.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law,Public Administration,Environmental Science (miscellaneous),Geography, Planning and Development

Reference52 articles.

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