In March 2020, distance learning replaced face-to-face learning for many activities: school, leisure time or family visits. Children and young people have found themselves projected into a constant virtual world.
The health crisis and the unprepared generalisation of distance learning and teleworking have led to a rapid and almost total digitalisation of collaboration and learning.
The increasingly intense use of digital communication reinforces infobesity, hyperconnection, social isolation and digital addiction. This phenomenon has significant consequences on the well-being, learning capacities and success of all users, especially the youngest: a population newly exposed to certain digital risks previously "reserved" for professional uses of digital technology.
Distance learning and teleworking have developed rapidly, increasing most individuals' technical (mainly digital) skills. Although digital natives are more technically intuitive, their use of and exposure to digital tools is wrongly assumed to be measured or self-regulated.
While these digital prejudices exist in all segments of the population, they are more deeply rooted and less nuanced in the under-27s, making their integration into the professional world perilous on a psychosocial level.
Preventing and protecting against digital abuses requires a dissociation between personal usage codes and socio-educational or professional uses. As human "connection instincts" are unfortunately not very inclined to promote mental well-being in a digital world, it is necessary to train and teach the youngest populations positive digital uses.
Faced with these problems, IMS Luxembourg is working on the "Digital Well-Being for Youth – Humanising the digital so as not to digitise the human" project with the support of the Œuvre Nationale de Secours de la Grande-Duchesse Charlotte. This project is committed to fighting against the prejudices of digital uses by bringing together students preparing for professional integration, employees with less than two years of experience, managers and employees in function.
IMS Luxembourg wishes to train people on the non-implicit nature of digital uses while preventing individual and collective mental impacts. Experiments will identify norms/clichés and provide tools to enable learning and working conditions framed by the concepts underlying digital well-being. The aim is to prevent psychosocial risks for the younger generation, which is certainly used to digital technology but cannot protect itself from it.
