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Physical, mental… digital: a new health for a new century
Improve the health of our relationship with digital technology, and I believe we can change our lives, and by extension, make the world a better place. At 2gether08, The Digital Health Service will bring us back home to where digital technology brings well-being to the people of the planet.
What is digital health?
Digital health is the measure, positive or negative, of our relationship to the digital technology we use to get things done in our work and life.
Prominent examples are how email stress affects our mental health: constant interruption in the long-term leading to depression, negotiating some of our key relationships through Facebook, social-networking fatigue and the level of panic and insecurity around admitting to not quite understanding work-related software. And who wants to admit that in this day and age they still don’t understand what a wiki, Basecamp, RSS or social-bookmarking is?
Our use of digital technology is at the centre of our work, our goals, our self-image and our relationships. We navigate most of our modern life through it. Regardless of whether we are fluent or pigeon-literate in it’s use, our digital health is the extent to which that use; truthfully brings benefit to us, our projects and our organisations.
A new view of ourselves
For Marshall McLuhan (not to mention Gregory Bateson) new technologies are ‘extensions of ourselves’:
“The personal and social consequences of any medium, that is, of any extension of ourselves, result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” - Marshall McLuhan.
Digital technology brings us this new scale (and indeed speed) and consequently our experience of ourselves has expanded into the digital realm; we already are digital. We need a new framework within which to think about a holistic notion of a healthy being and doing in our modern life.
A new health for our new century
We’ve had the idea of physical health for centuries and last century brought us the concept of mental health. This century brings us a new kind: digital health.
At 2gether08 we throw this idea and it’s logical consequences open to the world and ask: What new language, models of thinking and models of doing do we need to deal with this new phenomenon?
How can our digital technology most-positively facilitate our collaborations so that we can truly make an impact beyond 2gether08, the next decade and the next 100 years?
More info on The Digital Health Service.
Tags: Discussion
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© 2008 2gether08. 
Very supportive of this approach and will continue to stay in touch and integrate it into our social media education programmes (see http://nodestone.com/services/education/)
Check out what’s happening at 52 nights unplugged. Read Peter Pruyn’s paper linked from my page http://52nightsunplugged.ning.com/profile/LibbyDavy
Let’s get these issues on the agenda at all tech/society conferences like LIFT.
Off to yoga to rest these weary wrists right now!
I can’t wait to get involved with this session.
Interested in how technology and digital apps affect brain development whether for better or worse. Anyone have any interesting links to stories (remember there was a report on impact of email upon IQ fairly recently)?
Libby 52 Nights Unplugged is great!
Thanks for the comments guys - looking forward to talking about all this with you.