Alfonso Molina’s article on the HuffPost blog
In a new article published today on HuffPost, Alfonso Molina, scientific director of the Fondazione Mondo Digitale, draws on data from the Eurispes survey Digital Technologies and Mental Health to examine one of the most widespread yet least consciously recognised aspects of the online experience: constantly observing other people’s lives.
Among 18–24-year-olds, 97.7 per cent post content on social media and send private or group messages, whilst 86 per cent comment on others’ posts. But this active participation coexists with intense passive consumption: 96.5 per cent scroll through feeds without interacting, and 98.8 per cent view others’ stories, videos, photographs and profiles without participating.
It is precisely this overlap that calls for broader reflection. Social interaction, Molina points out, is a structural component of the human experience; what digital platforms alter is its intensity, making it permanent, potentially limitless and increasingly organised by algorithms. The risk is that of comparing the complexity of one’s own experience with selected and often idealised fragments of other people’s lives.
In this article, this reflection ties in with the Personal Ecosystem Canvas (PEC), the tool developed by Alfonso Molina to help people gain a systemic understanding of their own life ecosystem: relationships, resources, skills, environments, constraints and opportunities. Whilst scrolling constantly shifts our gaze towards the ecosystems of others, the PEC proposes the opposite movement: to pause, recognise one’s own field of possibilities and return to consciously planning future directions.
This perspective shifts the focus of digital wellbeing from simply reducing the time spent online to developing a deeper skill: distinguishing between the life we observe and the life we can build.
Read the article “When we scroll through other people’s lives” on HuffPost
