How to Make Digitalization Better Serve an Increasing Quality of Life?

Oleg A Kryzhanovskij,Natalia A Baburina,Anastasia O Ljovkina

doi:10.3390/su13020611

Oleg A Kryzhanovskij, Natalia A Baburina + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13020611

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Abstract

Modern people live in the era of knowledge and digitalization supposed to increase their quality of life. Nevertheless, digital technologies are only the instruments in the development and transformation of social-economic processes and their usage per se does not ensure only positive effects, which much depends on goals, conditions, institutes, etc. Thus, digitalization has an unambiguous influence on many social-economic processes and needs a wise policy to provide smooth progress and well-being for everybody. This study aims to design and test appropriate tools for managing digitalization to direct this process on increasing the quality of life. For this purpose we analyzed: (1) correlation to identify interrelations between digitalization and quality of life; (2) the potential of using the visualization matrix method to identify and monitor national trends of digitalization in the context of quality of life. We found: (1) close correlation between subjective and objective indicators of quality of life and between the quality of life and digitalization; (2) the two-dimensional matrix turned out to be a relevant visual tool that embraces specific two-way relationships between human development and digitalization. In combination with statistical and qualitative methods, this tool has wide prospects for managing digitalization in the context of social progress and increasing quality of life.

Highlights

Digitalization being a new level of technological progress and a new step in the knowledge era is supposed to be aimed at increasing the quality of life
This study aims to design the appropriate tools for managing digitalization to direct this process on increasing quality of life
The coefficient of determination (R2 ) 64% in 2018 indicates rather strong positive relationships between the objective conditions and opportunities for human development and subjective well-being and happiness, which allows choosing any of these indicators for further investigation of the relationships between digitalization and quality of life (Figure 1)

Summary

Introduction

Digitalization being a new level of technological progress and a new step in the knowledge era is supposed to be aimed at increasing the quality of life. Digital technologies have already passed from the status of being just an instrument to the status of a modifying factor changing social life in its every sphere. External digitalization expression is an expansion of the use of information and communication technologies and the implementation of digital technologies in human life, which act as a catalyst for the information society development. Information and communication technologies have an ever-increasing influence on human self-esteem, mutual actions, and socialization, the concept of reality and its perception, as well as interaction with reality [2]. In the modern world, digitalization acts as one of the key determinants of human development, affecting objective indicators of the quality of life and its subjective perception

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