How you affect the online world and your own wellbeing.

The conscious digital citizen: owning the impacts

Our lives have become blended between the physical and the digital, a dance between our tangible realities and the glowing screens in our pockets. We are more connected than ever, but this connection comes with questions, which thankfully more and more people are starting to ask...

Young people, in particular, face risks online. In 2020 in the UK alone, roughly one in five children aged 10 to 15 years in England and Wales (19%, or around 764,000 children) experienced at least one type of online bullying behaviour. When you couple these stats with the fact that children spend over 20 hours a week online by the time they’re in their teens, the need to understand and teach digital citizenship becomes apparent. 

Future Learn : Digital Citizenship Teacher Guide

The Digital Age is a grand experiment for humanity, a new dimension which we have been expanding into and exploring for the past twenty years. But like all experiments, the results are still rolling in, with time revealing the deep effects these digital spaces are having on us—on our minds, our bodies, and our spirits.

We need to take a pause, a deep breath, and ask ourselves: What are we really doing here?

The Digital Town Square: What Are You Broadcasting? What Are You Receiving?

The Digital Town Square feels loud and it’s busy. A quick scroll through the streets of Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, and you’ll see the hustle and bustle of people sharing their opinions, stories and behind the scenes whilst they sell, preach, teach, and yes, sometimes, fight. We spend a lot of our time now in these spaces, many of us for hours a day, navigating threads of content and comments, unaware of the energy we’re both picking up and leaving behind.

These digital spaces, our modern-day town square, is where we shape our public selves. The way we engage, the posts we choose to share, the comments we make—all of it ripples outward, influencing conversations, shifting the collective energy. And as the comments stack up, so does the pressure. Pressure to respond alongside the pressure of polarisation. This has seeped into all the corners of our online conversations. People are tired, people are scared, and social media has become the meeting ground for so much of it.

We have created a call-out culture that thrives on outrage, a digital mob mentality where mistakes are magnified, and public shaming has become sport. And yet, as Dr. Phil Parker once shared with me, negative comments hold four times the emotional weight of positive ones… Just imagine that. With every tap, every comment, we’re flooding our minds with more negativity than we might even realise.

Your Digital Living Room: How is it Shaping You?

Your digital living room is where we head to for more privacy, it’s where you chat with close friends on WhatsApp, hop into ‘private’ Facebook groups , tap into Telegram or drop into someones DM’s. Settling into a more intimate mode, but here’s the thing: just because it feels private, doesn’t mean it’s any less impactful on your mental health or energy field.

Mark Zuckerberg spoke in 2019 about this trend of ‘moving from the town square to the living room’, shifting to more of a ‘privacy-focused communication platform’. But are we really any safer in these digital living rooms? Or are we still feeding another layer of the system that harvests our data, subtly shaping our minds and behaviours while we feel secure in our private messages and group chats?

Our digital living rooms can foster connection, but they could also create echo chambers elsewhere in our social media newsfeeds. Have you noticed when your bestie send you a DM on Instagram, and the next thing your newsfeed is full of suggestions for the thing your friends into? These spaces—private as they may seem—are still driven by algorithms, and surveillance capitalism is still feeding off our interests and our data, guiding us in ways we often don’t fully understand.

So, while we may feel more relaxed in these seemingly more private corners of our digital experience, are we being mindful of how these conversations can shape our digital environments and ultimately our wellbeing?

Created by DALLE: A graphic representing the balance between the digital world and the physical self.

As much as we shape the digital world, it shapes us.

Every post, every comment, every message, every like— by interacting with and through a screen, we’re engaging in a feedback loop with an entire ecosystem that in turn influences our thoughts, feelings, and even our sense of self-worth.

Think about the way social media is designed, think about the gamification it uses through variable rewards, such as those likes, they are dopamine hits, keeping us coming back for more. We can’t keep feeding ourselves to the digital machine, letting the numbers define our success, or worse, our worth.

One of the tricks of big tech is that we don’t just play the game, the game plays us.

Social media apps are designed to hook us in, to make us feel like we need it. The question is, are we ready to step back and see the bigger picture? To look beyond the screen and realise the impact it’s having on our mental health, our time, our relationships?

Mindful Digital Citizenship ~ Taking Our Power Back

Susan Halfpenny from the University of York defines the concept of Digital Citizenship in these terms: 

‘On a simplistic level, we might take digital citizenship as the ability to access digital technologies and stay safe…However, we also need to consider and understand the complexities of citizenship as we start to become a digital citizen, using digital media to actively participate in society and political life.

We need to become more mindful of how we engage, here are a few steps we can take that I have found to help both me and my clients:

Pause before you post: Think about the energy you’re putting out. Is it adding to the noise, or bringing something constructive?

Be intentional with your time online: Are you using your digital time to foster real connection, or is it just a place to zone out and scroll?

Take breaks: Disconnect regularly. Your body, your mind, your spirit—they need it. Take a walk, spend time outside, and come back refreshed.

This is about balance, about integrating the digital with the physical in a way that supports our whole selves. As my fave tech psychologist

doreen dodgen-magee

says…

“The reality is that our digital and embodied lives come together to create one real, whole life.”

We don’t have to reject the digital world, we just need to bring more intention and awareness into it.

Digital citizenship isn’t just about what we do in public spaces, but also how we take care of ourselves and others.

I believe this is an important time for us to reclaim our power and become more conscious digital citizens.

Want to help me? I’m looking for paid opportunities to speak on this topic, if you want to dive into it with me and your clients, colleagues or kids, please reach out.

I am a certified Digital Wellbeing Coach (Consciously Digital) offering bespoke sessions, combining scientific research with personal exploration. I take people on a guided visualisation to the digital realm, with a Unicorn called Starlight, to explore how we feel about different apps and platforms. Adults and young people alike find this fun and insightful! Using poetry and reflective exercises to engage with participants, providing an inclusive, interactive and thought provoking session, where we are encouraged, without judgment, to explore our relationship to social media, the internet and our digital devices.