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1. Introduction
Over the last two decades, digitally-supported technologies such as social media, video games, fitness trackers, autonomous cars, voice-activated personal assistants, smart watches and robots have permeated personal life domains. This has created an array of cross-influences between personal, work and technology use domains (Piszczek et al., 2016; Yin et al., 2018), and blurred the boundaries between these domains (Chen and Karahanna, 2018; Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2013; Sarker et al., 2018). It has consequently led to the emergence of a range of new phenomena in the personal life domain, some of which can be positive for some users, such as the quantified self (Barcena et al., 2014; Lupton, 2016), and others that are largely negative, such as cyber-bullying (Chan et al., forthcoming), cyberloafing with personal technologies at work (Khansa et al., 2017) and using social media while driving (Turel and Bechara, 2016). Realizing that such phenomena merit research attention, 2018 is the third year in which we have organized a pre-International Conference on Information Systems workshop on the Digitization of the Individual (DOTI). This term encapsulates the penetration of digital technologies into individual users’ lives. Under these circumstances, individuals typically have a major say in their own technology selection and usage decisions, and these choices are often at their own expense (Matt et al., forthcoming). Thus, the theories, management of and phenomena related to such technologies may differ from these employed in traditional work settings.
One area of the DOTI that has not received much attention in a systematic fashion is the dark side of the DOTI. The dark side of technology use refers to negative, typically unplanned consequences of the use of technologies (D’Arcy et al., 2014a; Tarafdar et al., 2015b). Such issues permeate in adult workers (Tarafdar et al., 2013, 2015a; Turel and Serenko, 2010; Turel, 2017), young-adult students (Turel and Bechara, 2017; Turel and Qahri-Saremi, 2016, 2018) and children alike (McHugh et al., 2018; Turel and Bechara, 2019; Turel et al., 2016, 2017). They can include a variety of issues pertaining to security and privacy, addiction, technostress, distraction, sleep hygiene, physical health, mental health and well-being, all of which may affect the use of digital technologies in the...