Changing cultural landscape of digital disconnection in Finland from 2010 to 2025: a cultural cartography approach

Abstract

This study examines the evolving cultural landscape of digital disconnection in Finnish society from 2010 to 2025, focusing on how digital practices and disengagement are discussed across media platforms. Drawing on a corpus of over 11,000 documents from Finnish news outlets, forums, and social media, we employ computational text analysis using pretrained Finnish word embeddings and concept mover’s distance (CMD) to trace semantic shifts in public discourse. We operationalize four focal concepts—digital inequality, digital skills, digital anxiety, and digital detox—through a novel approach using subsetted anchor word combinations, enabling nuanced representations of cultural meanings. We hypothesize that engagement with certain dimensions of digital practices and social media has undergone substantial change. Early discussions of digital practices were linked to digital skills as cultural and social resources with unequal distribution, but over time, these practices have become increasingly associated with negative byproducts of digital consumption, such as digital anxiety. Our results show that engagement with digital anxiety has increased in both social and legacy media, whereas engagement with digital inequality has remained high, contrary to our initial assumptions. Methodologically, this study contributes to computational social science by demonstrating the utility of word embeddings and CMD for mapping cultural meaning structures and measuring concept engagement over time. Additionally, it introduces a robust approach for operationalizing theoretical concepts using word embeddings and anchor words.