The generationalism of digital wellbeing: the youth and adult regulatory, policy and cultural divide

As social media’s prevalence in everyday life continues to grow, so too do concerns about how to facilitate digital wellbeing. In response to the recognized increase in digital harms, governments and researchers have deployed digital wellbeing as a mechanism to describe self-care practices. This has had the effect of representing the digital ecology as a setting of substantial risk. This article critiques some of the ways in which digital wellbeing is conceptualized across policy, scholarly and everyday discourse dimensions, and how the concept has been used to construct young people as vulnerable and ‘at risk’ in ways radically differentiated from adults. Drawing on interview data from Australian adults, we explore how users have offered more nuanced approaches to digital wellbeing. Nevertheless, these wellbeing strategies are inverted in ways which exclude young people from their adoption in favour of protectionist regulatory measures.