Conference Statement

We, the participants of the Well Being in Digital Media Conference, which was held in Israel on the 17-19 February 2015, under the auspices of UNESCO and the working group on information for development in its Information for All Programme (IFAP), gathered in Israel as a trans-disciplinary group of experts from 20 countries and 5 continents. The conference focused on long-term well-being, happiness and health of humans and societies via the digital media environment for the coming decades. Possibly translated into long-term happiness, "well-being" refers to individuals' positive experience of life as meaningful to themselves and their societies even at times of crises. Well-being is a universal value, accepted today as an essential indicator of economic and social development (alongside other indicators such as GDP) by a growing number of countries and International organizations (such as the OECD) and it is a basic element of the declarations on human rights of international organizations such as UNESCO and other agencies of the UN family.

 

 

 

Based on our experience and the significant literature concerning well-being as well as the impacts of digital media, we believe that digital media represent both great opportunities and challenges for human well-being, and that some of these benefits and challenges are not sufficiently acknowledged and analyzed. Thus we are convinced that it is necessary to develop and implement strategies for leveraging digital media to enhance human well-being while at the same time limiting the risks and threats posed by their use, abuse or misuse. This can be done by further development of media and information literacy programmes in light of well-being oriented guidelines with the objective of educating users (especially the youth), by approaching technology developers to incorporate well-being considerations in the development, by in-depth evaluation of digital media and their uses, and by creating appropriate policy environments and related citizen capabilities. For this sake we wish to establish an international trans-disciplinary forum which will examine the economic, social, psychological, educational, philosophical and policy dimensions of human well-being on one hand and the knowledge available of the various long term impacts of the digital media on citizens and societies / their users, on the other. Relying on this knowledge the Forum will implement together with other stakeholders well-being oriented strategies for harnessing the power of digital media for the promotion of human development for all the world's citizens.