Digitalisation of the Individual: A Systematic Review from an Affordances-Use-Outcomes Perspective

Digital technology affords individuals to transform several aspects of their everyday lives, leading to different usage patterns with positive and negative outcomes for individuals. While digitalisation is discussed in detail from an organizational perspective, a comprehensive review on outcomes of digitalisation from an individual perspective is currently missing. Therefore, this paper aims to summarize and classify outcomes in lives of individuals that are caused by digitalisation. A structured literature review is conducted. The search string includes the digital individual itself and the digital individual as social being. We discuss the findings of 23 papers on the digitalisation of the individual and present the results in a concept matrix. We identify five types of affordances and differentiate four types of technology use. 25 positive and 31 negative outcomes were reported by existing literature. We contribute a more nuanced understanding of affordances, usage patterns and their outcomes which hold valuable insights for both research and practice