Covid-19 and the digital revolution

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the digital revolution has been both a negative and positive force. Within a few weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak, lockdown accelerated the adoption of digital solutions at an unprecedented pace, creating unforeseen opportunities for scaling up alternative approaches to social and economic life. But it also brought digital risks and threats that placed new demands on policymakers. This article assembles evidence from different areas of social science expertise about the impacts of Covid-19 in digitised societies and policy responses. The authors show how the pandemic supported changes in data collection techniques and dissemination practices for official statistics, and how seemingly insuperable obstacles to the implementation of ehealth treatments were largely overcome. They demonstrate how the ethics of artificial intelligence became a primary concern for government legislation at national and international levels, and how the features enabling smart cities to act as drivers of productivity did not necessarily give them an advantage during the pandemic. At the micro-level, families are shown to have become 'digital by default', as children were exposed to online risks and opportunities. Globally, the spread of the pandemic provided a fertile ground for cybercrime, while digital disinformation and influencing risked becoming normalised and domesticated.

Contextualising COVID-19 as a Digital Pandemic

“…Biases like these can prevent people from learning from news about COVID-19 and fight it effectively (McIntyre, 2020), also making individuals and groups more (2020), the world is now facing a "defining moment" as the COVID-19 pandemic enables digital technologies to extend their almost uncontrolled reach into every aspect of life. 5 See also Hantrais et al (2020).…”

Google Trends as a method to predict new COVID-19 cases

“…The Covid-19 outbreak and lockdown accelerated the adoption of digital solutions at an unprecedented pace, creating unforeseen opportunities for scaling up alternative approaches to social science. But it also brought digital risks and threats that placed new demands on policymakers (Hantrais et al, 2020).…”

“…This Fourth Industrial Revolution would develop exponentially rather than linearly and would ‘fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another.” (Schwab, 2015). At the micro-level, families are shown to have become “digital by default” (Hantrais et al, 2020).…”

“…The pandemic accelerated the uptake of digital solutions in data collection techniques (Hantrais et al, 2020). Budd et al (2020) portrayed digital technologies being harnessed to support public health responses to Covid-19 worldwide.…”

“…In the short term, face-to-face survey interviews were replaced by online interviewing, and by turning to other data sources. This direction of travel had to be abruptly scaled up as it became the “new normal” for data collection and dissemination (Hantrais et al, 2020).…”