Join the Cyber Policy Center on September 30 from 12PM–1PM Pacific for THWARTED VALUES? THE QUEST FOR DIGITAL WELL-BEING IN A DATAFIED SOCIETY, a seminar with Mariek Vanden Abeele.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Fall Seminar Series continues through December; see our Fall Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

Digital well-being and digital disconnection are twin concepts that recently emerged in response to people's growing struggle with 24/7 connectivity. Mariek Vanden Abeele examines the plethora of different meanings that both concepts are imbued with: Is digital well-being an individual quest or a moral imperative? Should we conceive of digital disconnection as a coping strategy, a luxury, or a plight? And with algorithms increasingly reifying the values we strive for, what does it mean to live a good digital life? The answers to these questions invite us to reflect on our contemporary ‘always on’ society and what agentic responses to disconnect from it might look like. 
 

About the Speaker:

Mariek Vanden Abeele is a leading scholar in communication research who integrates media psychological and media sociological perspectives to better understand the role of digital media in everyday life and society. Her work on digital well-being and digital disconnection has been widely recognized, earning, among others, the ASCoR Denis McQuail Award for Best Article Advancing Communication Theory and a prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant. She also received the Philip Eijlander Diversity (PED) Fellowship from Tilburg University (the Netherlands) in recognition of her extraordinary accomplishments as a female scholar.

Mariek is currently Professor of Digital Culture at Ghent University, Belgium. She began her academic career at the University of Leuven, where she obtained her PhD in 2012, before joining Tilburg University's School for Humanities and Digital Sciences, where she worked until 2021. She recently completed a four-year term as (vice-)chair of the International Communication Association’s Mobile Communication Division and is actively involved in various national and European policy initiatives.