Research

Digital wellbeing and everyday digital disconnection practices in China

In a ‘hyperconnected’ digital landscape where almost everything potentially connects and is connected (Brubaker, 2020), digital disconnection, or intentionally imposing limits on one’s digital technology use, tends to be framed as a solution to connectivity’s negative effects (Kania Lundholm, 2021; Vanden Abeele and Mohr, 2021) and a crucial component of digital wellbeing (Vanden Abeele, 2021).

However, current discussions do not sufficiently interrogate the contested nature of digital wellbeing and its entanglement with digital disconnection, and they remain largely grounded in Western and Global North contexts. As such, there is a need for research examining how digital wellbeing is understood and negotiated through practices of digital disconnection across diverse social and cultural settings. This also raises critical questions about whose digital wellbeing is being considered, and who is involved in defining it?

This project explores people’s ‘everyday digital disconnection practices’ and their digital wellbeing in a Chinese context. In China, prevalent digital connectivity, facilitated by super-app ecosystems like WeChat (Chen, Mao and Qiu, 2018), has integrated work, leisure, social interactions, and public services, making it difficult for people to disconnect.

Connectivity blurs the boundaries between work and life, under an intensified work culture, such as the ‘996 schedule’ (working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week), raising expectations that people are always online. Drawing on 30 diary-elicitation interviews, this project thus plots out different Chinese people’s perceptions, interpretations, and lived experiences of digital disconnection and digital wellbeing, and how they are shaped by the Chinese digital economy.

By offering an empirically grounded perspective on how individuals in a non-Western context negotiate digital dis/connection and digital wellbeing, this project also aims to enrich our understanding of how individuals conceptualise and evaluate ‘digital good’ in daily life and navigate the complexities of resilience in an increasingly connected world.

Team

Shaoying Zhang, PhD student, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield.

Professor Helen Kennedy, Professor of Digital Society, University of Sheffield.

Dr Ros Williams, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society, University of Sheffield.