Building Personal Resilience in The Network Age

Continuing the UNTHNKBL LIVE series on networks' current and future impacts on life, work, business and society, Michael Bayler turns to the profound and increasing challenges of mental and emotional wellbeing.

ON SPOTIFY / ON APPLE / ON AMAZON

This lively discussion with information industry advisor and education leader Julian Turner begins with an overview of the ground-breaking University of Oxford Brainwaves project, dedicated to researching and enabling mental and emotional health in young people.

We explore the crucial connections between individual identity and societal belonging, known to be compromised by over-exposure to online and social content, and the urgent need for techniques and tools to foster positive agency for wellbeing.

In particular, we draw on the work of the American positive psychologist Martin Seligman.

Along the way, we also reference the pioneering writings of Erving Goffman ("The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life", 1959) Anthony Giddens ("Self-Identity in Modernity", 1991), Thomas de Zengotita ("Mediated", 2005) and the Austrian neurologist and psychologist Victor Frankl's work on human meaning, based on his own extraordinary survival in the concentration camps, as described in "Man's Search For Meaning", 1946.