Panel Report: The Dark Side of the Digitization of the Individual

Digital technologies have diffused into many personal life domains. This has created many new phenomena that require systematic theorizing, testing and understanding. Such phenomena have been studied under the Digitization of the Individual umbrella and have been discussed in the Digitization of the Individual (DOTI) pre-ICIS workshop for the last three years. While prior
years have focused on a variety of issues, this year we decided to put special emphasis on negative effects of the digitization of the individual, i.e., “the dark sides” of the digitization of the individual. This manuscript reports on a panel of three experts (in alphabetical order: John D’Arcy, Hamed Qahri-Saremi, and Monideepa Tarafdar) who presented their past research in this domain, as well as their outlook for future research and methodologies in research on the
digitization of the individual. We introduce the topic, chronicle the responses of the panelists to the questions we posed, and summarize and discuss their response, such that readers can develop a good idea regarding next steps in research on dark sides of the digitization of the individual.