Panel: RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY ON THE FRONTIER OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES



31.5 - DIGITAL TIME AS RELIGIOUS TIME: CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGE OF DIGITAL WELL-BEING

AUTHORS:
Palumbo E. (University of Padua ~ Padua ~ Italy)
Text:
The post-pandemic period has been characterized by a proliferation of studies on digital well-being as a privileged lens through which examining the social transformations induced by hyper-connectivity. Time management - understood in both a qualitative and quantitative sense - attention span, conscious behavior, and the search for balance between online and offline have become central academic topics. This contribution proposes to read digital well-being not only as an ethical, psychological, and technological category, but as a primarily temporal issue that will increasingly become the focus of attention for religious traditions. Building on traditional historical-religious frameworks drawn from sociology, Italian historicism and anthropology - in which time has been conceptualized both as a social structure and as individual lived experience - the paper explores how digital technology profoundly changes the definition and experience of religious time, produces specific temporal regimes (multi-temporality, asynchrony, 'atemporality'), and how these characterizations interact with classical religious models of articulating time. Starting from the hypothesis that the distinction between sacred and profane time is being radically reconfigured in the digital age, the analysis examines how digital well-being theories, digital detox practices, prayer apps, voluntary disconnection campaigns, and meditative disciplines can be interpreted as attempts to renegotiate digital time through regulatory structures typical of both Western and non-Western religious traditions. The aim is to show how digital well-being can be considered today as a space of intersection between contemporary discourses on digital health and traditional religious logics of articulation and time management, contributing to the expansion of digital religion studies through critical reuse of classical concepts and definitions of temporality.