Enlarging the Self: Digital Well-Being and Confucian Philosophy

There are varieties of approaches to explore digital well-being, whose objective, as Christopher Burr and Luciano Floridi (2020) characterise, is to study the impacts of digital technologies on people’s well-being and their (self-) understanding of what it means to live a good life. The majority of these approaches conceive digital well-being primarily from an individualistic perspective, where individuals are considered to be the locus of well-being. Certainly, interpersonal and extrapersonal considerations such as social relationships, physical environments, etc., are not excluded by the individualistic approaches to digital well-being, but these considerations matter only instrumentally, and so are not viewed as inherent to our digital well-being. This chapter problematises the individualistic approaches to digital well-being and argues that a number of interpersonal and extrapersonal considerations should be viewed as constitutive of digital well-being. Drawing on the Confucian view of personhood, which is relational, developmental, and virtue-based, and the Confucian idea of oneness, which asserts our welfare is inextricably intertwined with other people, creatures, and things, I argue for enlarging our understanding of digital well-being to include various interpersonal and extrapersonal dimensions. This enlarged understanding of digital well-being, I suggest, can offer a more comprehensive approach to evaluate the impacts of digital technologies on human welfare.