An Investigation of the Socio-Cultural Impacts of the Digital Transformation in Developed, Developing, and Middle: Africa and Asia Pacific

Introduction

Of the many impacts that human activities exert, the one that truly stands out is the global changes that (Feola, 2015) and in a large scale, these changes are highly likely to result in social transformations. Although sociology scholars have all reached a consensus regarding the general idea of transformation as a major, fundamental change, there is little agreement over the marginal features that makes social changes social transformation(O’Brien, 2012).

Rabie(2013) and Gerards et al.(2021) defined social transformation as a means of restructuring all facets of life, from culture to social relations, from politics to economy, and from the way humans think to the way they live (Gerards et al., 2021; Rabie, 2013). Mina (2014) added that social transformation refers to a fundamental change in society, which happens to be deeply-rooted and more rapid than gradual(Mina, 2014). Social change and social transformation have always been a heated subject of research from the time these concepts were introduced by the prominent Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century up until the most recent paradigms of it were proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein in the twenty-first century (Ashraf et al., 2022).

Todd (2005) proposed that some core facets of social transformation – namely identity change, institutional change, and change in modes of practice – tend to be highly complicated phenomena to explore (Todd, 2005). In Schuerkens’ (2004) spectacles, social changes should be probed via two fundamental elements: First, the original factor that triggered and fueled the change; and second, the original and final situation as well as how they are characterized, in a before-after-comparison manner(Schuerkens, 2004). Hegmon and Peeples (2018) remarked that in pursuit of explaining social transformations, focus should be concentrated on the changes that shadows people’s life experiences, like economy and socio-political atmosphere These changes could occur either gradually and steadily, or radically rapidly (Hegmon et al., 2018).

In the post-industrial age, Rabie (2013) believed, social changes became more dynamic and faster paced in the light of revolutions in information, technology, telecommunication, societal advents, economy, and above all, with the march of globalization. It is, then, evident that at the turn of the third millennium, with the uprise of affordable user-friendly personal computers, smartphones, the Internet, and digitalization of sales and services, social transformation is coming to the stage at a far swifter pace: The age of digital transformation(Maseno & Wanyoike, 2022).

Digital transformation could be recognized as a tremendous paradigm shift (Perez, 2010). Also labeled “digitalization”, or “digitization”(Demlehner & Laumer, 2019), being interchangeably employed in research (Hausberg et al., 2019), digital transformation could be basically defined as shifting from analog information to zero-one codes for the purpose of storing it in, processing it with, and transmitting it by computers(Bloomberg, 2018). In a similar definition, Legner et al. (2017) remarked that digital transformation referred to the technical process of converting analog signals to digital ones. These two definitions tend to be rather technical, nevertheless(Legner et al., 2017).