Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

This is the winter of our discontent with the dark sides of the Internet in the era of effective artificial intelligence. Social media roil our societies, broad claims are made about the harvesting of personal data underpinning the coming surveillance economy, entire job categories and any number of workplaces are threatened with extinction, massive security breaches and exposures abound, and the challenges of collective action enabled by online platforms are being faced. And all of this is before we think of the technostress and other psychological and cognitive challenges to individuals. Of course, this is also the winter when the Internet and the web with the associated technologies truly enable us to live and work, speed the innovations that save many lives and enable us to respond to emergencies, empower us to communicate and work together, and provide the warp and weft of our social and societal lives, and as e-commerce (EC) feeds us and clothes us. EC in HealthTech, EduTech, FinTech stands for the transformations of the great swaths of our lives that disperse the innovations and benefits of digitalization across nations and round the world. These terms comprise, among many others, such wonderful benefits to people as virtual access to a major city medical specialist from a rural location, an opening to a new pursuit via massively open online courses (or MOOC), and a participation in the marketplaces for the unbanked. The lift we all can receive from the Internet-based technologies has to be understood and sometimes earned with an effort. Our hopes for a better life must attach to the effective assimilation and diffusion of powerful technologies. The Internet-based technologies and artificial intelligence—primarily machine learning—are the contemporary engines of innovation, productivity, and human flourishing. The speed and relentlessness of this technological revolution do disorient and induce anomie that we witness all around us. At the same time, we are offered opportunities for a continuing enrichment of our personal and working lives. We should remember that all powerful technologies have dark sides and multiple-order negative effects, many of them recognized only in the fullness of time. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries had brought misery to millions before bringing freedom from poverty and prosperity to billions. This having been said, now that we are increasingly aware of the features of the dark side of our digital lives, we need to intensify our research and see them whole and apart, and we need to direct our research at the actions to be taken against the dark sides we now perceive. This is the way we can all share more fully in the benefits of digitalization. This special issue on Dark Sides of Digitalization is a worthy contribution to this very large task. Its guest editors, Ofir Turel, Hamed Qahri-Saremi, and Isaac Vaghefi, present to you four papers that focus on such deleterious aspects as technostress and overdependence on social media. The authors bring to our attention the new forms of stress occasioned by the ever-emerging new technologies, adopt new perspectives on the phenomena, and bring new tools to their studies. Multiple theoretical perspectives and research methodologies have been deployed, and the results offer actionable recommendations on stress reduction INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 2021, VOL. 25, NO. 2, 125–126 https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2021.1887693