How's Life in the Digital Age?
Opportunities and Risks of the Digital Transformation for People's Well-being
This report documents how the ongoing digital transformation is affecting people’s lives across the 11 key dimensions that make up the How’s Life? Well-being Framework (Income and wealth, Jobs and earnings, Housing, Health status, Education and skills, Work-life balance, Civic engagement and governance, Social connections, Environmental quality, Personal security, and Subjective well-being). A summary of existing studies highlights 39 key impacts of the digital transformation on people’s well-being. The review shows that these impacts can be positive as digital technologies expand the boundaries of information availability and enhance human productivity, but can also imply risks for people’s well-being, ranging from cyber-bullying to the emergence of disinformation or cyber-hacking. In sum, making digitalisation work for people’s well-being would require building equal digital opportunities, widespread digital literacy and strong digital security. Continued research and efforts in improving statistical frameworks will be needed to expand our knowledge on the many topics covered in this report.
How's life in the digital age in the Czech Republic?
Relative to other OECD countries, the performance of the Czech Republic is characterised by low risks but also low opportunities. The access to Internet has improved substantially over the past decade, and is now above the OECD average at 83.2%. However, there is a comparatively high level of inequality of uses, meaning that while some groups make use of a large variety of Internet uses, the majority of the population makes use of only a few activities. The Czech Republic performs relatively poorly in terms of online job search with the lowest share of individuals having used the Internet for searching a job (5.4%). The country is exposed to the risks of digital transformation to a limited extent, although it has one of the highest rates of exposure to disinformation (36%) while the rate of people expressing political opinions online is the lowest among OECD countries. The share of people having followed courses online is also low, but the Czech Republic performs relatively well in digital resources at school, with 77.7% of students having access to Internet connected school computers.