A Digital Nexus

Humans beings in the 21st century face significant social and global change. Ever-evolving digital technologies are increasingly embedded in the material, economic, and socio-cultural milieu; while global crises in climate change present challenges to human and global security and resilience. Social science and human-computer interaction research has investigated how digital systems might help to understand current environmental changes and intervene in the problematic human relationships to scarce resources of the natural world. This chapter reviews research contributions of sustainable human-computer interaction (HCI) and the social sciences on human consumption of resources most crucial to human life: water, energy, and food (WEF). Briefly outlining the current and ongoing evolution of digital technologies particularly concerned with embedded urban digital infrastructures in “smart” and automated technologies and the Internet of Things, it then touches on the scope and scale of the simultaneous environmental challenges posed by population growth and urbanization. It introduces sustainable HCI as one approach that directly addresses both trends. The chapter then outlines the most significant approaches that have informed the development of “sustainable HCI,” and reviews important empirical contributions underpinning the developing interdisciplinary research in the field. It outlines the current understanding of household resource use and considers how developing digital technologies might support domestic resource conservation and mitigate intensive domestically based resource consumption. The chapter closes with observations on the shifting relationships (and sustainable HCI research into them) that might constitute future ways of being in a sustainable digital age.

Computer-Mediated Communication and Mental Health

The relationship between computer-mediated communication (e.g., Internet or social media use) and mental health has been a long-standing issue of debate. Various disciplines (e.g., communication, psychology, sociology, medicine) investigate computer-mediated communication in relation to a great variety of negative (i.e., psychopathology) and positive (i.e., well-being) markers of mental health. We aim at charting this vast, highly fragmented, and fast growing literature by means of a scoping review. Using methods of computational content analysis in conjunction with qualitative analyses, we map 20 years of research based on 1,780 study abstracts retrieved through a systematic database search. Results reveal the most common topics investigated in the field, as well as its disciplinary boundaries. Our review further highlights emerging trends in the literature and points to unique implications for how future research should address the various relationships between computer-mediated communication and mental health.

Conclusion

We conclude the Handbook of Digital Technology and Society by identifying topics that appear in multiple chapters, are more unique to some chapters, and that represent general themes across the material. Each of these is considered separately for the ESRC theme chapters and the non-ESRC chapters. In the ESRC theme chapters, cross-cutting research topics include digital divides and inequalities; data and digital literacy; governance, regulation, and legislation; and the roles and impacts of major platforms. Cross-cutting challenges include methods; theory development, testing, and evaluation; ethics; big data; and multi-platform/holistic studies. Gaps include policy implications, and digital culture. In the non-ESRC chapters, more cross-cutting themes include future research and methods; technology venues; relationships; content and creation; culture and everyday life; theory; and societal effects. More unique, these were digitization of self; managing digital experience; names for the digital/social era; ethics; user groups; civic issues; health, and positive effects. The chapter also shows how the non-ESRC chapters may be clustered together based on their shared themes and subthemes, identifying two general themes of more micro and more macro topics. The identification of both more and less common topics and themes can provide the basis for understanding the landscape of prior research, what areas need to be included in ongoing research, and what research areas might benefit from more attention. The chapter ends with some recommendations for such ongoing and future research in the rich, important, and challenging area of digital technology and society.

ESRC Review

Two workshops were part of the final steps in the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) commissioned Ways of Being in a Digital Age project that is the basis for this Handbook. The ESRC project team coordinated one with the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (ESRC-DSTL) Workshop, “The automation of future roles”; and one with the US National Science Foundation (ESRC-NSF) Workshop, “Changing work, changing lives in the new technological world.” Both workshops sought to explore the key future social science research questions arising for ever greater levels of automation, use of artificial intelligence, and the augmentation of human activity. Participants represented a wide range of disciplinary, professional, government, and nonprofit expertise. This chapter summarizes the separate and then integrated results. First, it summarizes the central social and economic context, the method and project context, and some basic definitional issues. It then identifies 11 priority areas needing further research work that emerged from the intense interactions, discussions, debates, clustering analyses, and integration activities during and after the two workshops. Throughout, it summarizes how subcategories of issues within each cluster relate to central issues (e.g., from users to global to methods) and levels of impacts (from wider social to community and organizational to individual experiences and understandings). Subsections briefly describe each of these 11 areas and their cross-cutting issues and levels. Finally, it provides a detailed Appendix of all the areas, subareas, and their specific questions.

Governance and Accountability in Internet of Things (IoT) Networks

Societies and their underlying infrastructure are in the process of being transformed by digital technology, a change that requires updated legislation and governance structures to respond to new information contexts. One particular area of rapid growth is that of connected devices that are increasingly being deployed in the physical environment as part of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). There has been significant attention by policymakers at both national and international levels as to the economic and social benefits these technologies can bring and how they can be effectively implemented, leading to a range of different governance models. Many of these models relate to larger scale deployments as part of “smart city” urban infrastructure programs. Unlike private sector Internet of Things devices, which require buy-in from individuals who voluntarily purchase technology and choose to use it, public space deployments can affect entire communities. They must therefore particularly include mechanisms by which citizens can be empowered. We present a thematic review of literature and policy pertaining to IoT governance models, and construct a framework of principles for IoT governance, highlighting emerging and remaining questions. Four emergent themes (Levels of Governance, Legitimacy and Representation, Accountability, and Transparency) are illustrated using case studies at two levels; national and supranational top-down governance models, and city-based context-specific implementation models.

Workplace “Digital Culture” and the Uptake of Digital Solutions

This chapter reviews prior work on technology acceptance and then reports on a nationally representative survey of UK employees exploring both employee’s personal experiences of digital technologies at home and work and their evaluations of the effectiveness of the technologies and the “digital culture” in their organization. Presenting the results of 3040 UK workers, it seeks to explore the factors that influence digital roll-outs by focusing on the experiences and perceptions of the UK workforce as a whole, with the expectation that introducing new technology alone isn’t enough. This research explores how “digitally ready” organizations are in the UK in terms of people, processes, and company culture. It concludes that a large proportion of the UK workforce are not seeing the benefits of digital technologies. Importantly, there is a need for organizations to understand that making digital solutions a success is a process of cultural change in their organization.

The Changing Nature of Knowledge and Service Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines

One of the most significant recent technological developments concerns the application of intelligent machines to jobs that up to now have been considered safe from automation. These changes have generated considerable debate regarding the impacts that the widespread adoption of intelligent machines could have on the nature of work. This chapter provides a thematic review, across multiple academic disciplines, of the current state of academic knowledge regarding the impact of intelligent machines on knowledge and service work. Adopting a work-practice perspective, the chapter reviews the extant literature concerning changing relations between workers and intelligent machines, the adoption and acceptance of intelligent machines, and ethical issues associated with greater machine human collaboration. A key finding is that much of the research discusses intelligent machines complementing and extending human capabilities rather than removing humans from work processes. The concept of augmentation of humans and human work, rather than wholesale replacement from automation, flows through the literature across a range of domains. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main gaps in existing knowledge and ways in which future research may provide a deeper understanding of how people (currently and in the near future) experience intelligent machines in their day-to-day work practice. These include the need for multi-disciplinary research, the role of contexts, the need for more and better empirical research, the changing relationships between humans and intelligent machines, the adoption and acceptance of the technology, and ethical issues.

Digital Inclusion and Women’s Health and Well-Being in Rural Communities

This review explores the role of digital inclusion in women’s health and well-being in rural communities. This involves reviewing existing research that focuses on the information experiences of women, specifically those who were digitally excluded or limited users of the Internet, who have benefitted from the support of digital inclusion initiatives and technology. There is a global gender digital divide in which more women than men often lack access to information and digital skills, particularly in rural areas. Digital inclusion initiatives are attempting to close this divide and to enable women to make informed decisions about their health and well-being and their families. The review also identifies that digital inclusion is a complex situation of enquiry; there is limited, fragmented research in which the concepts of information literacy and digital inclusion have been brought together; and significant tensions and contradictions exist within digital inclusion practice. The review also highlights the opportunity for further research and theory development.

ESCR Review

This chapter describes the analyses and results for the ESRC Domain of Governance and Security, guided by two questions: What are the challenges of ethics, trust, and consent in the digital age? How do we define responsibility and accountability in the digital age? It first provides an overview of the major insights from the literature review and analysis, the Delphi surveys, and workshop discussions about pertinent concepts of governance and security in a digital age. The most frequent concepts emerging from topic modelling included social movements and protest communication, Internet governance, measurement, automation, EU commission and privacy, urban migration mobile, social media, law enforcement, and Marxist analysis. Comparing these results with the most common words in the literature review, five major topics emerged: state use of digital media, especially surveillance of social movements and protest; Internet regulation and governance, both national and international; children’s use of digital media, both protection and regulation; regulation and governance of automated systems; and deception in digital media. Gradually, emphases shifted from regulation of general technology use to concerns with privacy, data protection, and children’s use of digital technologies. The analyses also identified the kinds of theory, methods, and approaches in the literature. The review provides examples of literature in the project’s time period that illustrate these topics. It ends with a discussion of future research directions (e.g., accountability for digital systems and their impacts, algorithms and the law, human factors in cyber security, and ethics) and research challenges (e.g., cybersecurity, governance, and transnational governance).

Digitizing Cultural Complexity

One of the major terminological forces driving information and communication technology (ICT) integration in research today is “big data.” The characteristics of big data make big data sound inclusive and integrative. However, in practice such approaches are highly selective, excluding input that cannot be effectively structured, represented, or digitized; in other words, excluding complex data. Yet complex data are precisely the kind that human activity tends to produce, but the technological imperative to enhance signal through the reduction of noise does not accommodate this richness. The objective of this chapter is to explore the impact of bias in digital approaches to knowledge creation by investigating the delimiting effect digital mediation and datafication can have on rich, complex cultural data. If rich or complex data prove difficult to fully represent on a small-scale level, in the transition to a big data environment, we run the risk of losing much of what makes this material useful or interesting in the first place. We will begin by reviewing some of the existing implicit definitions of data that underlie ICT-driven research. In doing so will draw attention to the heterogeneity of definitions of data, to identify the key terms associated with data demarcation and data use, and to then expand on the implications of this heterogeneity.