Living Digitally: Mapping the Everyday Contours of a Still-Emerging Data-Driven Era

This opening chapter deconstructs the notion of living digitally, and sets the context for the interventions that follow in some 26 chapters on a wide range of digital society issues in the volume. It discusses digital life as engaging with post-analogue technologies and AI applications that have become much more organic to people’s daily activities. It posits that being digital encompasses varied activities, such as the building of new networks of remotely located friends, and creating the ability to complete work tasks and educational goals using re-imagined life-worlds or remote intellectual tools, now increasingly facilitated by generative artificial intelligence. Being digital can mean forging a personal or corporate life, linked to the metaverse, and lived concurrently in real and virtual spaces. The chapter observes that to be more meaningful, digital life must be more globally equitable and better serve community, through wider access to the internet, mobile telephony networks or social media platforms. The chapter analyses this diverse data-driven emerging lifeworld, with its multifaceted spaces risks and opportunities, as the reality that we call digital life. The chapter therefore contextualizes the wider content to be found in this Palgrave Handbook of Everyday Digital Life. The book itself seeks to map the contours of diverse digital experiences, through its varied chapters, organised in 5 sections. It speaks to the divides, disruptions and delights, as experienced by people at an individual level, or as a community, in traversing our digital everyday lives.