Ural Federal University: University Researchers Looking For Happiness Formula
Scientists at the Ural Federal University are studying the problem of ensuring the well-being of modern people and future generations. They address this problem within the framework of the project “Human Well-Being in Digital Transformation”. Specialists study the impact of modern technologies on human well-being, which change ideas about memory, transform communication space and require new ways to solve demographic and social problems. For this purpose, scientists use digital humanities methods in their research.
According to researchers, the parameters of human existence have changed radically over the past 20-30 years: ways and forms of communication, forms of memory, virtual and augmented reality, robotics, artificial intelligence. All this presents new challenges of a technological, ethical, legal, psychological nature, which humans have not previously encountered. The very notion of well-being is changing under these new conditions. In this project, scientists define well-being as the security of the individual with resources, which gives one a sense of confidence in the present and the potential to maintain a stable state in the future.
“Well-being is associated with the realization of a person’s inherent potential, his abilities, talents, a sense of inclusion in the social natural environment. It occurs when there is stability, when the resource base is relatively stable and it makes it possible to implement long-term programs: from training to raising a child,” explains Anna Plotnikova, project leader and professor of the Department of Fundamental and Applied Linguistics and Textual Science at Ural Federal University.
The project aims to clarify new aspects and parameters of human well-being in the modern digital world, finding ways to minimize risks and improve the quality of human life. For this purpose, it is divided into three tracks. The first one, “Language Markers and Communicative Strategies of Well-Being”, is focused on the study of communication as the most important component of contemporary human well-being. Internet communication requires a new way of thinking about modern technology of communication. To solve this problem, scientists will create a large text corpus of media resources in the Ural region to develop a map of well-being and offer methodological recommendations for the formation of a well-being speech environment in the digital media space.
The second track of the project is “Human Well-Being in the Field of Reproductive Donation and Family Institution”. Scientists of the Ural Federal University together with the European Medical Center “UMMC-Health” and the Federal State Budgetary Institution “Ural Research Institute of Organic Medicine” of the Russian Ministry of Health are developing a methodology of social and psychological support of recipients and donors in reproduction. This direction will help to comprehend the challenges associated with new biomedical technologies, in particular, with solving the problem of infertility and, as a consequence, broader demographic problems.
“In our clinic, a significant percentage of cycles are performed using donor material. The social and psychological diagnosis of an oocyte donor becomes especially relevant for all participants of the process: the clinic, the recipients and the donors themselves,” says Dmitry Mazurov, head of the IVF Department at UMMC-Health.
The track “Preservation of Historical and Cultural Memory as a Factor of Well-Being” is connected with the new possibilities of preserving public memory, which appeared together with the development of new information technologies. Ensuring continuity in the life of human communities, maintaining identity, and transmitting social and cultural experience is an integral part of human well-being. The result of the implementation of this track will be the development of conceptual systems in the field of industrial tourism, creative economy of services, branding, the formation of a comfortable living environment, positioning of the historical heritage of industrial civilization of the Urals.