Reimagining Digital Well-being: A Theoretical Framework Based on the Psychology of Felt Structure and Illustrated through Creative Storytelling

Digital environments today often lack affordances that cultivate a sense of place and embodied being and acting. We develop a theoretical framework for embodied place-making based on people's psychological tendency to balance structure (clarity, predictability, and certainty) with unstructuredness (openness and possibility). This framework provides a unified theoretical foundation for examining continuity and discontinuity in social psychological processes and behaviors across digital, physical, and natural environments. We illustrate this framework through an original story ( NewsWood ) that reconceptualizes digital news reading as an experience akin to wandering through woods. We hope to inspire radical reimagining of how future digital environments can foster well-being across individuals, communities, societies, and the natural world within their interconnected relationships.