After a long day I of intense thinking and walking, I wanted to reflect on everything I’m working on in the digital cultures space. Here we go.
Most of what I’m trying to work on are research projects that require massive amounts of reading and staying upto date with the field. This one time after a session rabbit holing on internet governance, I got so overwhelmed I had to call a friend and vent out about everything I had missed, just to calm down. The world of internet governance under which digital cultures could also be included, is progressing quickly in multiple ways and areas. Numerous interesting and very intelligent people are working on things I couldn’t even imagine.
Advances in algorithmic responsibility, AI ethics, decentralised governance and so much is happening, yet as one person it’s only possible for me to consume so much and concentrate on so much. Patronus Labs is my attempt to make a dent in this field and help add to the knowledge about people and their relationships with digital devices and lead them to having good relationships.
Most of these questions aim to understand causation and correlational relationships to better establish a framework around human behaviour in the digital world.
So, getting back to what I’m working on and the Ideas I have at this point.
Currently Active.
Impacts of Digital Habits on Life Satisfaction.
This is my Masters thesis. I’m investigating the effects of digital effects on life satisfaction. I hypothesise that an individuals digital habits affect their life satisfaction as a second order effect. There are good habits and bad habits, and there is an negative correlation between these two and levels of life satisfaction.
Social and cultural influences on digital habit formation.
This focuses on investigating what effects our social and cultural influences have on the formation and continuation of digital habits. Check out SCID for more.
Intntion
This is a long scale project that doesn’t yet have an end goal, but the idea behind the project is to promote intentionality as a solution for digital dependency instead of abstinence and half separation. We are in the digital world and we have to learn to live with digital devices and build better relationships with them, instead of shunning them.
Bootstrapping.
Emotional Saturation due to Social Media Influences.
The idea behind this is the current content consumption patterns are influencing emotional changes in humans, especially saturating our emotional responses. My hypothesis here is that the content we are consuming is normalising and devaluing certain things that used to mean very much. Where an effort of 5 was considered great, now requires 10 or 12 to achieve the same effect these days, especially to induce positive affect. I’m not sure how true this is, but worth investigating.
A general purpose test bed for digital wellbeing researchers.
The idea is to research and develop a general purpose test bed for digital wellbeing researchers with insights from stakeholders on what they would like to collect and insights from users as to what they’re comfortable sharing.
Need more evidence
- Changes in perception of life satisfaction and digital wellbeing after awareness about current digital habits.
- Digital addictions as coping mechanisms for underlying emotional needs.
- How can we measure digital device interactions in a subjective way?