Digital Fears Experienced by Young People in the Age of Technoscience

Abstract

With the advance of technoscience, digital technologies have started to reshape the traditional array of social fears experienced by younger generations by triggering the appearance of new, digital fears. In this article, we undertake a sociological analysis to investigate the concept of digital fears both theoretically and empirically. Our survey conducted among Russian young people aged 18-30 in 2020 (N = 1050, Sverdlovsk region, RF) showed that fear is a distinctive characteristic of the social well-being of this generation. Moreover, fear tends to become more pronounced both quantitatively (i.e., the frequency of emergence) and qualitatively (i.e. the emergence of new types). The identified digital fears of young people allowed us to draw their typology. Depending on the specifics of digital threat, the following types were distinguished: those associated with impact and control, crime and security, communication and activity, technology and innovation, and social inequality. We show that the expanding range of social fears leads to the formation of catastrophic thinking in young people, thereby affecting the level of social well-being and distorting the image of the future.