• Toward a Research Agenda on Digital Media and Humanity Well-Being

    European Roadmap 2023

Reference: Chavalarias. D, Casilli, A.A., Delanoë, A., Rosnay, M.D. de, Gelder, B.D., Frau-Meigs, D., Jouve, B., Dana, D., Amor, N.B., Boros, A., Brunori, M., Brites, M.J., Caldarelli, G., Datchary, C., Fassi, L., Hernandez, L., Nowak, A., Víctor, R.-D., Slater, M., Buchanan, M., Horodecki, P., Kotilainen, S., Lassègue, J., Lazega, E., Lobbé, Q., Lukowicz, P., Mcdougall, J., Meacham, D., Omodei, E., Orben, A., Patriarche, G., Pearce, D., Pediconi, M.G., Romani, S., Roth, C., Sackur, J., Schafer, V., Fabrizio, S., Soria-Frisch, A., Holstein, E.S.V., Tummolini, L., Zichichi, M., Chavalarias, D., 2023. Toward a Research Agenda on Digital Media and Humanity Well-Being (report). Scientific Roadmap for the European Commission.

Abstract

In the 2020s, an American citizen will spend an average of 6h35 a day on social media, compared to 3h35 for television. As for social networks, which were non-existent less than 20 years ago, about 40% of US citizens use them at least once a week as source of news and they now have an estimated 60-70% penetration rate worldwide.

This means that in less than a generation, digital media have radically transformed the way we inform and socialize, and that this transformation is still ongoing as older generations are gradually replaced by digital natives. From a scientific point of view, this transformation generates many phenomena to be studied, and even “unknown unknowns” whose effects will be revealed only with time.

This roadmap covers the issues, impacts and future challenges of digital media as they relate to human well-being in the broadest sense, from mental health to the health of democracies. Its objective is to initiate a new interdisciplinary research community in this field, to define a research agenda, to formulate recommendations for future digital media policy and design, and to inspire future EU calls for projects to develop innovative and transdisciplinary research on these societal challenges.

The roadmap is the result of the EU-funded project DIGEING conducted by an international consortium with the help of an interdisciplinary advisory group of international experts. Its writing was based on an hybrid methodology developped at CNRS and powered by GarganText, where the advisory group acted both as catalyst and guide for a larger collaborative mapping of the state-of-the-art and identification of challenges of that emerging field.

More than forty researchers from fourteen European countries have contributed to the writing of this roadmap. This roadmap is complemented by online interactive maps that can be used by researchers to situate themselves in this evolving scientific landscape and by research funding agencies to launch new calls for projects.

  • Authors

    David, C., Casilli, A.A., Delanoë, A., Rosnay, M.D. de, Gelder, B.D., Frau-Meigs, D., Jouve, B., Dana, D., Amor, N.B., Boros, A., Brunori, M., Brites, M.J., Caldarelli, G., Datchary, C., Fassi, L., Hernandez, L., Nowak, A., Víctor, R.-D., Slater, M., Buchanan, M., Horodecki, P., Kotilainen, S., Lassègue, J., Lazega, E., Lobbé, Q., Lukowicz, P., Mcdougall, J., Meacham, D., Omodei, E., Orben, A., Patriarche, G., Pearce, D., Pediconi, M.G., Romani, S., Roth, C., Sackur, J., Schafer, V., Fabrizio, S., Soria-Frisch, A., Holstein, E.S.V., Tummolini, L., Zichichi, M.