Digital Wellbeing

We disconnect to protect ourselves. We stay plugged in to avoid getting left behind.

We're in a race with AI, and apparently our value lies in how well we can compete. Running that race is making is overwhelmed, anxious, and exhausted. Meanwhile, we're sold a story about ourselves: we’re addicted, highjacked, helpless. Maybe the story feels true, or partly true. But it’s also a narrative that disempowers us, smacks of learned helplessness, and lets platforms off the hook.

Elaine has spent two decades researching the psychology of our digital lives. In her keynotes, she explores the agency we still have, and how we can use it to live better lives.

Drawing on cyberpsychology, contemplative practice, and her work as an author and consultant, Elaine explores:

• Competing narratives: The stories we're sold about both technology and ourselves, and whose interests they serve

• The limits of optimisation, productivity, and efficiency: Why it’s such a problem that machines are trying to be more like humans, and humans are trying to be more like machines

• Where agency lives: How we can live in the most workable zone, where we understand we’re not totally in control but refuse to surrender to helplessness

• Device mindfulness: Original mindfulness experiences that help audiences deepen awareness and agency in the face of technology, available as part of keynotes or as standalone workshops

Why this talk?

Elaine applies a unique lens that moves past familiar, tired debates about screen time and addiction to the deeper questions: what are we being sold, and why do we react the way we do? How can we nurture critical thinking and reclaim greater freedom?

Audiences leave not with rules but with a different sense of what's possible. Elaine brings wit, rigour, and nuance to a topic that’s almost always oversimplified.

Who is this for?

Creative conferences, wellbeing and ideas festivals, digital-culture events, and organisations wanting a smarter take on digital wellbeing. This topic is available as a keynote or workshop, including the digital mindfulness activity experienced by attendees at the PolyOpportunity Berlin Salon and educators at Haberdashers’ Elstree Schools.