The Digital Lifeworld and Salutogenesis.

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors explore salutogenesis in the context of the 'digital world', concerning both high- and low-resource countries. The digital world is rapidly developing and can transcend physical and financial barriers of health care and health promotion. The digital world also has many challenges, especially for equity. On the one hand, digitalization carries the risk of excluding many people - also healthcare workers - because they cannot access the digital world or do not have the technical skills to understand it (make sense of it). On the other hand, the digital world offers both new generalized resistance resources (GRRs) and specific resistance resources (SRRs) to improve population health and promote healthy lifestyles and health literacy. The authors nicely illustrate how the sense of coherence (SOC) helps people find a balance in the digital world's stress-rich environment. Important steps forward in this field include work to strengthen the evidence base and to document the preconditions for a digital world that supports decision making in health care, health behaviour change (e.g. quitting smoking) and - above all - supports empowerment and social justice.