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Data Healing Workbook Preview by Neema Githere Siphone
The Data Healing Workbook is the product of seven years' worth of my own exasperation with Instagram. I’ve fluctuated between urgency-informed oversharing and reactive divestment for most of my young adult life. In 2019, I made a whole spectacle of my Final Divestment™️ (only to return to Instagram 8 months later, inspired by a class I attended that my beloved Olivia Ross facilitated). That year, I started a divestment practice of seasonal-presence: spending 3 / 4 months offline, and 3 / 4 months offline (fully deactivating my account); which lasted until October 2023.
With support from Stanford University’s Digital Civil Society Lab, I embarked on the journey of compiling my digital spirals and the personal toolkits I developed in response to them into what is now this journal. The journal was more or less finished by September 2023, but just as I was gearing up to put it out in the world, the genocide in Gaza began and I put the project to the back-burner out of necessity. Everything I thought about how leaving Instagram was essential for our liberation was challenged to its core, as people on the ground facing terror – from Gaza to Tigray – pleaded with the world to share about what was happening to them, with any and all platforms at our disposal.
My conceptualization of Data Healing continues to evolve, and so will this document. The internet is always changing, but there are some things that stay the same: our longings for connection, our fears of being misunderstood, our frustrations at not being heard. I wrote this journal to try and honor the duality of it all; but most of all, I wrote it to try and look shame in the face, and ask that shame where it’s really coming from.
At its core, this workbook is about naming–not shaming.
Internet giants profit off of our shame: they uplift the notion of likes and follower counts, and then contribute to an ecosystem where it’s uncool to admit that you notice.
But caring is in.
This workbook is designed to help you:
Map how you feel.
Map what you pay attention to.
Map the judgements you make of yourself.
Map the judgements you might make of others.
Through a combination of theory, archival materials, near-future speculative non-fiction, and guided reflection exercises.
If enough people get creative about how to connect with one another, and how to unlearn the toxic habits that social media encourages, the easier it will be to move towards liberation — both on and offline.
