What are you currently working on?

Since January, I started working as a postdoctoral researcher on the SpaceTeen project,  together with Sindy Sumter, Susanne Baumgartner, and Amber van der Wal. SpaceTeen focuses on addressing excessive social media use among youth through design interventions, using a co-creation approach. Together with young people, designers, municipalities, and societal organizations, the project will explore several intervention angles like redesigning social media environments, developing disconnection tools for youth, and rethinking “third spaces”. It’s really inspiring to be involved in a project that combines academic research with collaboration with creative design partners to bring these ideas to life and test them in practice.

 

Can you share a project that changed the way you think or work? 

I have very much enjoyed the focus groups and design sprints we conducted in the past months for SpaceTeen with children and adolescents. It was a refreshing and insightful experience to approach the research process by first letting young people explain their own digital worlds. For example, 10-year-olds could clearly describe which platform features they perceived as most responsible for keeping them engaged, explain the social norms surrounding media use within their friend groups, and show me how features are now adopted in their daily lives, as they share stories on WhatsApp and chat with their friends through Spotify. These experiences made me reflect on how difficult it is to draw conclusions about young people’s online experiences without genuinely involving them in the research and allowing them to speak for themselves.

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Which piece of work feels closest to your heart, and why?

That is probably my very first paper: the systematic review on digital disconnection literature. Looking back, I think it was the best possible start I could have had in academia and for my PhD trajectory. I would actually highly recommend starting a PhD with a review paper, because it gave me a strong foundation of research to fall back on. It really helped me understand the field, identify the key debates, and clarify where my own research could contribute. At the same time, the paper is also meaningful to me because of the collaboration behind it. The project started while I was working at the University of Antwerp together with Heidi Vandebosch and Karolien Poels, and later evolved into a collaboration with my PhD supervisor Kathrin Karsay. It's because of this review that I ended up doing an entire PhD on digital disconnection.

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Nassen, L. M., Vandebosch, H., Poels, K., & Karsay, K. (2023). Opt-out, abstain, unplug. A systematic review of the voluntary digital disconnection literature. Telematics and Informatics, 81, 101980. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2023.101980

 

What's a question you keep returning to?

A question that keeps coming back to me (literally) is one that I hear all the time when people learn that I research voluntary disconnection strategies. Many immediately ask: “So, what should I do disconnect, what works best?” and then start describing that they are unhappy about their phone use in some way. At the moment, my answer is usually that the first step is to identify what exactly bothers you about your own smartphone use. Is it the amount of time you spend on it, the constant interruptions, the feeling of being always available, or something else? Only then can you find strategies that fit your specific challenge. What keeps me returning to this question is that I would like to have a better answer. As my research progresses, I hope to move beyond general advice and provide more concrete, evidence-based recommendations that can genuinely help people manage their digital lives in ways that work for them.

 

If you had a tagline or motto, what would it be? 

If it’s a tagline that I keep telling myself, it would be something like: “Stand still and look at where you already are.” Academia is a career path that is very much built around the next step: the next paper, the next project, the next position. Because of that, I often have to remind myself to pause and appreciate what is already done, and to celebrate the small wins along the way. Related to that, I try to remind myself to also enjoy the research process more rather than only focusing on the finish line. Research can sometimes feel like a series of deadlines and goals, but some of the most rewarding and insightful moments happen while you're figuring things out.

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If time, money, and logistics weren't a concern, what dream project would you dive into?

I would love to design a study that is probably almost impossible to conduct in practice: one that could comprehensively track what people do with the time they gain when they disconnect from digital media. A lot of research focuses on what happens when people reduce their screen time, but we know much less about what replaces that time. Do people spend it on offline activities and hobbies, social activities, exercise, rest, or something else entirely? And which of these activities result in the most positive and rewarding outcomes? Using a combination of observational research, intensive digital trace data, and experience sampling methods, it would be fascinating to try to piece together that puzzle.

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I do believe that the benefits of disconnection do not simply come from being offline, but from what that offline time is filled with. Understanding how people reinvest their attention and time, and which activities contribute most to their well-being, is a question I would love to explore in much greater depth.

 

What's one thing you wish someone had told you when you were starting out as a scholar? 

To pay as much attention to the positives as to the setbacks. I've learned that a rejection often feels much worse than an acceptance feels good. Because of that, I would urge my younger self more to consciously celebrate the small wins: a paper acceptance, positive feedback, finishing a difficult task, or simply making progress on a project. Those moments deserve just as much attention, even though they often pass by much more quickly.

 

What is a book or paper that shaped the way you think about the world?

Again, a throwback to my early days in academia: when I was first getting acquainted with the topic of digital disconnection, I was recommended the book Digital Detox: The Politics of Disconnecting by, of course, Trine Syvertsen. It was one of the first books I read on the topic, and I remember finding it back then incredibly insightful, inspiring, and simply fun to read. Thinking about it now, I actually really want to reread it!

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Syvertsen, T. (2020). Digital detox: The politics of disconnecting. Emerald Group Publishing.

 

Who's someone whose work deserves more attention - and who you want to nominate as the next featured scholar? 

My nomination would be Arturo Cocchi (Ghent University). He is about to defend his PhD (yay), so I'm really looking forward to hearing more about his perspective and the insights that have come out of his research.