| dc.description.abstract | Most phenomena in the world have both positive and negative aspects (pluses and
minuses). This is also true of digitalization. However, lately a lot more emphasis has been placed on
the positive potentials of digitalization than on its negative potentials and already occurring negative
effects. Digitalization is supposed to bring increased efficiency leading to greater speed and lower
costs. The question is: greater speed and lower costs for whom? Who is actually profiting from
digitalization in a narrow and broader sense? In this paper, I will discuss the idea that perfectly well
functioning social practices, like human face-to-face communication, shopping, banking, medical
care, education, administration, policing, travel, taxi, hotels, old age care (using robots), car driving,
military attack (using drones), security, privacy etc. have already been or should be ”disrupted” (a
recent positive buzz word) and exchanged for digital services, supposedly bringing greater efficiency
and sometimes a “shared economy” through increased speed and lower costs. Below, we will note a
number of such examples, coming, for example, from shopping, where customers are asked to
register what they buy themselves and then pay with a plastic card, in this way recording their
purchase for the benefit of the shop owners, credit card company and bank, or from academic
education, where knowledgeable persons lecturing can be exchanged for a digital learning
environment, where students learn on their own. We will pose the question: “When is digitalization
warranted and when not?” When is it better to trust established human practices than to disrupt and
substitute them with digital replacements? When should we not fix what is not broken? How can we
digitalize with care, avoiding disruption of some of the best practices evolved by mankind? | sv |
