Digitalization of Society and Socio-political Issues 1

17Towards a Generalization of Digital Technology in Education?

Seeing the majority of people consulting their multifunctional phones on public transport, children communicating with each other by email while in the same room and young people’s rooms turning into places where they watch, mostly individually, films, series and videos online for several hours a week (Thoër et al. 2015), there is no doubt about the importance of digital technologies in the information and communication practices of modern societies. Workplaces change with technological developments and living spaces change as new technologies are integrated, or traditional elements are connected to the Internet, as highlighted by the work on the Internet of Things (Saleh 2017), which is considered to be “at the heart of global anthropogenic technological transformation” (Noyer 2017, p. 2). Beyond environments, it is indeed human relations that are changing according to the uses of digital technologies, both in the workplace and in the private sphere, to the point of encouraging the implementation of strategies to manage their borders (Jauréguiberry 2014; Roudaut and Jullien 2017).

The rapid development of these technologies and their widespread use in society and daily activities are such that the questions raised by the evolution of “machines and people” (Linard 1990) are no longer reserved for science fiction, and Schwab (2017) considers that digital technology is at the root of a fourth industrial revolution. ...