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The Data Healing Workbook: Introducing: 'Digital Attachment Styles'

This journal is for anyone who suffers from FOPO (the Fear of Posting Online). 27-page document + free Digital Attachment Styles pamphlet below.

Neema Githere Siphone

Jun 27

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Introduction

This workbook is for anyone who suffers from FOPO (the Fear of Posting Online).

I am someone who came of age online, and who has seen some of the best and worst parts of the internet as a result. A lot of us know that social media is making us spiral, become more self-conscious and more judgemental. It’s become commonplace for people to take extended social media breaks, but the platforms are designed to have us coming back for more: more validation, more visibility, more connection, more opportunity, more engagement – and, most recently, more devastation.

What happens if we think about our relationship to social media as just that: a relationship. As with any relationship, it has its highs and lows and is fundamentally built off of attachments. The majority of us use social media day-to-day, and over time have developed a relationship to unwritten social contracts.

Selfies are out, photo dumps are in.

Posing is out, blurry is in.

The rules are always changing. But who’s writing them, really?

This time last year, I started working on the Data Healing Journal. After years of spiraling on and about Instagram, I managed to land institutional support from Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab to put it all together. If you know me, you know how I feel about academia. I dropped out of Yale 7 years ago – largely because of data trauma – and my work since leaving college has revolved around grassroots spaces (which, to me, Instagram is part of – for better or for worse).

The journal was more or less finished by September, 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 backburner 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.

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.

Governments strategically cut off social media when they are planning to intensify their terror. This is what happened in Tigray, in Gaza, Sudan, West Papua, New Caledonia. And this is precisely what happened in my own home country, Kenya, these past few days in response to the paradigm-shifting Anti-Finance Bill Protests. Twitter was shut down. Internet became sporadic. And the government had the audacity to blame it on undersea cables.

Today, I woke up to emails from my Stanford cohort about our fellowship’s final presentation showcase. I’ve been so deep in other organizing work that I had completely forgotten it was this morning. I hadn’t revisited the journal in months but when I opened it back up to get ready to share, I was surprised by how much I myself needed to do the exercises in it.

Categories: Evaluation, Compassion, Reflection, Inspiration, Goal-Setting and Strategy

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 make of others.

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.

Everyone reading this is welcome to download/print/share the pamphlet that summarizes my favorite part of the workbook, '“Introducing Digital Attachment Styles”.

I’m a perfectionist so it’s hard for me to put things out when they still feel unfinished, but a number of folks who came to the showcase sent messages that encouraged me to share it as-is, and so in the spirit of Presentism – here goes!

The Data Healing Workbook is the product of nearly a decade of my own exasperation with Instagram. I’ve fluctuated between urgency-informed oversharing and reactive divestment for years. 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). In 2020, I started a practice of seasonal-presence: spending 4 / 5 months offline, and 4 / 5 months offline; which lasted until October 2023.

Shame is something I reckon with often – it’s something I’m reckoning with as I write this. Part of what held me back from sharing the workbook is that it’s been a product of a lot of hard reflection both privately and publicly – the latter of which has felt particularly cringeworthy on occasion – and this is work I hope I can be paid for. And that longing is in conflict with my desire to prioritize accessibility in the most rigorous way possible. That being said, my aversion to compromise means that there are very limited ways for me to make my practice materially sustainable. Considering the kinds of things I write about on here, I’ve intentionally not put my newsletters behind a paywall.

The reality of things, though, is that I have medical bills to attend to and rent to pay and debts to cover. Fellowships will pay you to travel and do research, but there isn’t room for line items to go towards dental care in those budgets. I want this work to reach and to help as many people as are in need of it. And I also want and need to be able to provide for myself along the way. With that in mind, what feels most sustainable is to share the full workbook to paid monthly/annual subscribers to this newsletter.

If you’re reading this, and you’ve found the work that I share valuable / have the material ability to – I ask that you consider purchasing a yearly subscription, gifting one to a friend, or contributing directly. There are folks from 89 (!!) different countries on this mailing list, and I know that a paid subscription is far less accessible for folks outside of America & Europe – so if anyone reading this is financially unable to support via a monthly or annual subscription, please reach out and I will give you access to the full (27-page long) document for free! (My inbox is a shame-free zone 🤍)

The Data Healing Workbook is a private document (not downloadable/printable) for the time being. I’ll be manually granting access to emails from my paid subscriber list as folks join, but please reach out if I’ve happened to miss your email or if you are requesting access from an email that’s different from the one that you’re a subscriber here with.

That being said, everyone reading this is welcome to download/print/share the pamphlet that summarizes my favorite part of the workbook, '“Introducing Digital Attachment Styles”, for free. I’m excited to share more about this soon :) and will be continuing to add to the workbook / hopefully printing physical copies of it as well! (If anyone has tips/resources/support they might be able to offer on this front, it would be much appreciated.)