Digital extended personality: development and testing of а digital daily life self-management scale

Background. The explosion of digital technologies and gadgets acting as sociocultural tools, forming a new technologically rich ecosystem, raises more and more questions in the scientific community about considering technologies not only as tools, but as external extensions or additions of a person. Objectives. The aim of the work is to develop and validate the Self-Management of Digital Daily Life (SMDDL) scale for digital extended personality. Study Participants. The study sample consisted of 1,797 adolescents and youth aged 14–35 years. Methods. The study utilized the SMDDL scale developed by the authors. The scale includes 3 subscales. To assess convergent and discriminant validity we used the self-assessment of user activity and online social capital, the Digital Competence Index, the Internet Addiction Scale, technique for assessing changes in psychological boundaries when using technical means MIG-TS-2, and the Attitude Towards Technology questionnaire. Results. The structure of the scale was refined based on the results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (subscales Digital Device Management, Digital Sociality, Experiencing Digital Daily Life, α = 0.80–0.88). Compared to youth, adolescents scored lower; males scored higher than females on the three subscales of the SMDDL. All of the SMDDL subscales are positively related to the user activity, technophilia, and a number of MIG-TS-2 scales. Of the three subscales, only Digital Device Management did not show a positive relationship with Internet addiction, but was positively related to digital competence and technorationalism. Conclusions. Based on the data obtained, a conclusion was made about the reliability, consistency, and validity of the developed SMDDL scale. User activity and technophilia are the conditions for the formation of an extended digital personality, while digital competence and technorationalism become the tools of self-management of the diversity of digital extensions. Internet addiction as one of the risks for a technologically extended personality can be offset by the ability to self-manage one's digital extensions.