Digital Wellbeing in an AI-Mediated World: Selfhood, Safety, Consent, Creativity & the Futures We Want
What does it mean to be well in a world where more and more of our lives, relationships, identities and creative work are mediated through digital systems?
Digital wellbeing is often reduced to screen time, distraction or the need to “switch off.” But our relationship with the digital world is becoming much more complicated than that.
We are encouraged to share, connect, collaborate and build our identities online. At the same time, we are expected to remain vigilant about privacy, fraud, surveillance, data harvesting, misinformation and the increasingly uncertain boundaries around how our words, images and ideas are being used.
So where does the digital self begin and end?
What is the difference between our digital self and our digital brand? How do we remain psychologically safe online when participation can require constant vigilance? What does meaningful consent look like when material can be copied, scraped, recombined or used by AI systems? And how do we protect creativity and intellectual work without withdrawing from the openness and exchange that make digital communities valuable?
These questions sit at the heart of Juli Rush’s work on digital selfhood and digital community, which asks directly how we navigate psychological safety, selfhood, consent, creative ownership and protection in an increasingly complex online environment.
Join Juli Rush and Steven Lichty for a 90-minute participatory conversation supported by the Participatory Futures Global Swarm exploring the human dimensions of digital life.
Rather than treating digital wellbeing simply as a set of risks to manage, we will approach it as a futures question:
What kind of relationship with technology do we actually want to create? The conversation will move across:
Digital identity and psychological safety
Consent, attribution and ownership
The protection of our personal and professional selves
Practical choices we can make around sharing, privacy, security and digital participation
Juli’s digital wellbeing work emphasises deciding our own risk tolerance, protecting the personal digital self, defining consent, staying informed and taking action toward the future we want. It also highlights practical professional considerations such as data storage, encryption, attribution, copyright and clearer boundaries around the sharing of creative work.
A soft launch of THRIVE
The gathering will also serve as the soft launch of THRIVE — the Foresight and Wellbeing Community of Practice, a Swarm-supported space at the intersection of participatory futures, mental wellbeing and healing-centred practice. THRIVE is Transformational, Healing-Centred, Re-sourced, Interrelational, and Embodied, and is designed as a participatory space where foresight practitioners, mental health professionals, community healers, educators, peacebuilders, artists and facilitators can co-learn, co-create and apply new approaches to futures thinking.
The connection to digital wellbeing is intentional.
THRIVE begins from the proposition that future-making is emotional, relational, embodied and shaped by lived experience. Anxiety, disconnection and a lack of safety can narrow our sense of possibility, while wellbeing, belonging and agency can expand our capacity to imagine.
Digital wellbeing offers a fitting starting point for the community…a contemporary challenge where technology, identity, creativity, safety, relationships, imagination and human agency all meet.
This event is for futurists and foresight practitioners, creators, researchers, consultants, facilitators, educators, mental wellbeing practitioners, community builders, people working with technology and AI—and anyone curious about how we might build healthier relationships with our increasingly digital world.
Come with your questions, experiences and uncertainties. We do not need to have the digital future figured out before we begin shaping it.