About
Welcome to Musings IRL, personal reflections from the double life of a digital native. I’m Adele Zeynep Walton, author of Waterstones bestseller Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World.
Despite the fact that ICT was my least favourite subject at school, for the past 5 years my work has been focused on the harms of Big Tech and how we can rebuild social media to be better. From protesting outside Meta HQ, to speaking at EU parliament, to confronting a tech billionaire at Davos, I’ve been at the forefront of the fight for our digital rights since a personal loss in 2022 led me to this fight.
I’m an award-winning journalist with bylines in The Guardian, The Observer, The Nerve, Dazed, Big Issue, and many more. I’ve been interviewed on Channel 4, Sky News, BBC News, Al Jazeera on topics including digital misogyny, AI and creativity, smartphone bans and addictive algorithms. In 2024 I co-founded Logging Off Club, a global movement across 4 continents dedicated to hosting phone-free events to help people connect with themselves and others.
As a Gen Z who got her first Facebook account at 10 years old and has been posting almost daily on Instagram since the age of 12, I grew up in social media’s prime and I benefitted from it in many ways. The internet and Big Tech’s profit motives have shaped me in ways I’ll never be able to fully unravel, but that’s my intention here.
Now in my late 20s, I’m on a journey of unlearning and relearning, discovering what real connection feels like, finding out what I’d be spending my time doing if there was never an audience, unpacking what is truly part of me versus what I’ve been conditioned to feel as part of the first children to grow up in the attention economy.
But it isn’t just social media I want to talk about here; it’s convenience culture, capitalist extraction, individualism, ego, and I believe these are all linked to the ways in which we feel fractured, torn and overwhelmed today. Musings IRL will be a space for me to share the honest reflections that come to me when I’m away from a screen, in the mundane moments, the spontaneous encounters and conversations with my closest friends.
I hope they resonate.
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For speaking enquiries, get in touch via ray@swayedstudio.co.uk
