Perceptions and Analysis of Digital Risks

Conclusion

Digital uses have become commonplace over the last few decades and the seductive discourse extolling the potential of digital technology have facilitated its acceptance in society. However, technological advances have never ceased to evolve, with each new development bringing its share of new situations and potentially anxiety-provoking problems. The notion of risk, frequently used, corroborates this feeling. By aiming to solve many problems, digital technologies are also inevitably at the origin of new challenges and uncertain effects that Jacques Ellul pointed out in the 1980s¹. These effects are never exclusively positive or negative: technologies often encompass both. They indirectly orient uses by authorizing or not certain practices, but they are also a source of inventiveness for users who manage to transform or even divert the uses initially planned, to make other uses, no matter their intention, good or bad. Thus, digital technology is not inherently good or bad. Thinking about information and communication technologies leads us rather to try to understand how individuals appropriate them and to what extent these uses transform their daily life.

By seeking to go beyond the opposition between good and bad uses, this book has sought to compare the notion of digital risk with the discourse, representations and practices of actors in different professional fields. The contributions have allowed for a reflection on the uses of digital technology in schools, in ...