Research Workshop on
Digital Well-Being

Despite their profound individual and social implications, the ramifications of online content consumption on our psychological well-being remain largely unexplored from a regulatory perspective: Is this a justified decision or a mere legislative oversight? At our Research Workshop on Digital Well-Being held on 18 April 2024 at Schloss Hohentübingen, experts from various disciplines offered invaluable insights into the relationship between well-being and digital activities and engaged in a set of lively and stimulating discussions with the attending researchers.

The workshop was kicked off by host and moderator Michèle Finck, who offered a warm welcome to all guests and introduced the objective of the workshop: determining whether there is a need for regulatory intervention beyond existing provisions (e.g. in the EU Digital Services Act or the Artificial Intelligence Act) as well as identifying opportunities for future transdisciplinary research.

The introduction was followed by presentations of invited expert speakers David Gilo (Tel Aviv University), Isabel Brandhorst (University Hospital Tübingen) and Christian Montag (University of Ulm), who addressed the subject from the perspectives of Law and Economics, Medicine, and Psychology, respectively. Each presentation was followed by a roundtable discussion, which allowed to both consolidate a shared understanding of the subject and to elaborate on aspects of particular interest, such as the challenges of determining the influence of online content consumption and persuasive technology on the frequency of online engagement, emotional state and psychopathological phenomena, the purpose of defining harms and designing thresholds for overindulgent internet use, and possible fallacies of concepts for conscious internet usage and informed online decision-making.

Following a shared lunch, which provided opportunity for further exchange, Asia J. Biega (Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy) and Matthew J. Dennis (University of Technology Eindhoven) presented relevant research from the fields of Computer Science and Ethics, hereby addressing both the design of AI systems and the question of responsibility of online platforms and digital services providers for user well-being. The ensuing discussions revolved, among other things, around the benefits and challenges of general vs. individualized approaches to digital well-being at both a conceptual and technical level. The workshop concluded with contributions from Michael Birnhack (Tel Aviv University), who spoke on the legislators’ role in achieving a balance between individual and public interests in the context of war reporting in an era of global digitalisation, and from Oren Asman (Tel Aviv University), who provided a bioethically informed perspective on the utilization of generative AI in mental health.

As highlighted in Michèle Finck’s closing remarks, this workshop emphasized the complexity of the issues surrounding digital well-being across disciplines and successfully provided intriguing avenues for future research collaborations.