Lecture

Join us at Sussex Digital Humanities Lab for a conversation about the human cost of the digital world with Adele Zeynep Walton, journalist, author and University of Sussex alumnus. At this special event, Adele will also read an extract from her debut book “Logging Off” (Orion Publishing, 2025) which draws on her own lived experiences and loss, to make the case for radical re-claiming of digital space.

About the book:

We live in a digital world. In the 30 years since we’ve been online, we've created connections, crossed boundaries and discovered new worlds. We have done things generations before us could never have imagined.

But at what cost?

Growing up as a Gen Z, Adele spent endless hours as a teenager on social media, shaping her view of herself and the world. As a freelance journalist, she has used her social media platforms and digital technology to develop a career in an unfamiliar and competitive industry, benefitting from the opportunities that these spaces can offer. But after losing her sister to online harms, she realised that our current digital world is failing us.

We are an anxious and discontent generation. Our lived realities and our online vulnerabilities are inextricably linked, and this means big business for social media tycoons who want us to stay scrolling at any cost. As Big Tech barons make their billions, capitalising on our emotions, instincts, insecurities and desires, everyday people are losing out.

From workers being fired by algorithms, to online forums dedicated to revenge porn and encouraging suicide, to censorship of marginalised voices and the turbulent impacts of AI, Logging Off reveals that our digital world is currently fuelling crises that only empathy, agency and humanity can resolve. This book is a call for a radical reclamation of our digital world, for a more humane future that empowers us all.

About Adele Zeynep Walton

Adele Zeynep Walton is a British-Turkish journalist reporting on the human impacts of digital technology and social media, and the author of Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World, which will be published in June 2025.

Adele is an online safety campaigner with Bereaved Families for Online Safety and Ctrl + Alt + Reclaim, a Europe-wide youth movement to reclaim our digital world. She is also a youth ambassador with People Vs Big Tech and Connected By Data fellow.

She is also the founder of Logging Off Club, which brings people together offline at phone free events to reconnect and promote connection, curiosity and wellness.

She is an alumnus of University of Sussex (International Development, 2017).

Book onto the event here!

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Posted on behalf of: Development and Alumni Relations
Last updated: Thursday, 3 April 2025