El impacto de la conectividad digital constante en la salud cognitiva y la responsabilidad social

El impacto de la conectividad digital constante en la salud cognitiva y la responsabilidad social* Evgeniya Nikolaeva1, Polina Kotliar2, Aisylu Kamaleeva3, Nataliya Soldatova4 1Kazan (Volga region) Federal University, Kazan, Russian Federation. E-mail: [email protected]; ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0150-1611 2Kazan (Volga region) Federal University, Kazan, Russian Federation. E-mail: [email protected]; ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4795-8841 3Kazan (Volga region) Federal University, Kazan, Russian Federation. E-mail: [email protected]; ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3284-3358 4Kazan (Volga region) Federal University, Kazan, Russian Federation. Kazan National Research Technical University named after A.N. Tupolev-KAI, Kazan, Russian Federation. E-mail: [email protected]; ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1122-7441 Resumen. La conectividad digital constante y la expansión de los medios de comunicación, así como de los modelos de lenguaje (LLM, por ejemplo, ChatGPT), están cambiando los ritmos de aprendizaje, aumentando el tecnoestrés y los riesgos para el sueño y el bienestar de los estudiantes. Los servicios de trabajo social prestan cada vez más atención a este problema. Sin embargo, para desarrollar programas que mantengan la salud cognitiva y promuevan la responsabilidad social, los servicios de trabajo social necesitan directrices basadas en la evidencia para la prevención, la detección temprana y el apoyo institucional. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo vincular datos dispersos y transformarlos en recomendaciones prácticas para programas similares. El objetivo de la investigación fue resumir estudios empíricos y de revisión sobre el tecnoestrés y el uso de los medios en la educación, e identificar puntos manejables de intervención del trabajo social. Se realizó una revisión narrativa y de alcance de los años 2018–2025 (fuentes: ERIC, SciELO, Redalyc, eLibrary, CyberLeninka), con selección según PRISMA-2020/PRISMA-ScR, cribado en dos etapas, extracción estandarizada y síntesis temática. Los riesgos más persistentes se asocian con la tecno-invasión y la sobrecarga tecnológica; los LLM ofrecen economía cogRecibido: 25/02/2025 ~ Aceptado: 29/08/2025 INTERACCIÓN Y PERSPECTIVA Revista de Trabajo Social ISSN 2244-808X ~ Dep. Legal pp 201002Z43506 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17642879 Vol. 16 (1): 285 - 293 pp, 2026 *The publication was carried out using funds from a subsidy allocated to Kazan Federal University for the implementation of project No. FZSM-2023-0022 «Digital socialization and digital competence of young people in the context of global systemic changes: regulation technologies, risks, scenarios» within the framework of the state assignment. 286 Nikolaeva, Kotliar, Kamaleeva, Soldatova Interacción y Perspectiva. Revista de Trabajo Social Vol. 16(1): 2026 The impact of constant digital connectivity on cognitive health and social responsibility Abstract. Constant digital connectivity and the spread of media, LLM (for example, ChatGPT) are changing learning rhythms, increasing technostress and risks to students’ sleep and well-being. Social work services are increasingly paying attention to this problem. However, in order to develop programs to maintain cognitive health and promote social responsibility, social work services need evidence-based guidelines for prevention, early detection, and institutional support. This work is designed to link disparate data and turn it into practical recommendations for similar programs. The research goal was to summarize empirical and review studies on technostress and the use of media in education and identify manageable points of social work intervention. A narrative-scoping review of 2018-2025 (ERIC, SciELO, Redalyc, eLibrary, CyberLeninka), selection according to PRISMA-2020/PRISMA-ScR, two-stage screening, standardized extraction and thematic synthesis were conducted. The most persistent risks are associated with techno-invasion and techno-overloading; LLMs provide cognitive economy, but increase the requirements for verifying and filtering responses. Social work should combine micro-interventions (sleep hygiene, notifications, critical reading of AI responses), meso-level digital well-being programs, and macro-policy work to support cognitive health (LMS quiet hours, AI ethics). Key words: technostress, neural networks, social work, cognitive overload, post-disciplinary society. INTRODUCTION Modern research in the field of social sciences is characterized by a tradition of critical analysis of digital technologies as external extensions of a person that have a destructive effect on memory and cognitive abilities in general (Bozhkova et al., 2024). The achievement-oriented, high-performance culture often runs counter to a person’s physical and mental capabilities, forming the phenomenon of “subject overload.” Modern technologies impose the burden of quick decisions on humans, and in pursuit of this, we fall into a state that the German researcher T. Fuchs calls desynchronization, thereby fixing the gap between one’s own time and the world (Fuchs, 2001). The popularity of this research area is explained by the expanding experience of everyday human interaction with the manifestations of digital capitalism. The user is increasingly dependent on online media — digital platforms shape their epistemic strategies, contribute to the emergence of nitiva, pero aumentan las exigencias de verificación y filtrado de las respuestas. El trabajo social debe combinar microintervenciones (higiene del sueño, gestión de notificaciones, lectura crítica de respuestas generadas por IA), programas de bienestar digital a nivel meso y acciones de política a nivel macro para apoyar la salud cognitiva (horarios de silencio en los LMS, ética de la IA). Palabras clave: technostress, neural networks, social work, cognitive overload, post-disciplinary society. El impacto de la conectividad digital constante en la salud cognitiva y la responsabilidad social 287 Vol. 16(1) enero - abril 2026/ 285 - 293 dopamine dependence on short fragments of audiovisual content, and determine the chronotope of a modern subject. In the framework of the expanded interpretation of media proposed by the classical media theory of M. McLuhan, the media is understood as any intermediary, conductor – clothes, bicycle, house, money, etc. All these, according to M. McLuhan, are peculiar conduits of information. Continuing this logic, it becomes normal to consider and evaluate the human body through the prism of its ability to perceive and process the amounts of information it operates with in the modern media space. The expanded interpretation of media proposed by media theorist M. McLuhan (1988), we can state that such innovations as the emergence of GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) models, in particular ChatGPT, were ambiguously perceived in society. On the one hand, it was accompanied by heated discussions and criticism, especially in the academic community, since this tool of intellectual work, unlike a blackboard or ruler, forces us to rethink the entire tradition of the educational process. The value of the centuries-old humanitarian narrative is decreasing (Pashkurov et al., 2025) and is turning into a graphemonic practice of technology generation. On the other hand, the media has changed people’s social behavior by influencing educational processes and expanding new horizons of ways to obtain information. Constant digital connectivity and the spread of platform communications have radically changed educational practices and rhythms of everyday life, increasing cognitive load and fragmentation of attention (Abdullayev et al., 2024). At the level of the subject, this is manifested in the phenomenon of technostress — stress caused by information and communication technologies. The concept of the Technostress Creators Scale (TCS) includes five dimensions: technooverload, techno-invasion, technocomplexity, techno-certainty and techno-certainty. International studies have linked these factors to exhaustion, decreased well-being, and sleep disorders. A modern student spends his day using different types of content. The day begins with studying news content, and the way to school involves consuming content from platforms such as TikTok, social media, and mobile games. Lunch breaks are accompanied by watching entertainment videos and TV series, evening leisure is represented by video games, watching TV series and movies (Kharkovskaya et al., 2023). At the same time, it all looks like an attempt to fill the day with meaningful content. A person loses the opportunity to eat without entertainment, look around in the subway or out the bus window, and cannot even sleep alone. In a post-disciplinary society, the gap between the demands one places on oneself and the possibilities of their realization is the source of an individual’s mental problems. The speed of innovation is colossal, and its inhuman speed conflicts with human resources. As a result, the personality experiences constant overload, fatigue and a sense of guilt for his own unfulfillment. The lack of human scale in digital infrastructures leads to the fact that network life becomes non-functional, therefore, consumer demands for eco-friendly consumption arise, associated with the formation of the possibility of refusing a permanent connection to the network, disabling notification signals, and recording time spent in the application. METHODS A narrative review with elements of a scoping review was conducted, designed according to the guidelines of PRISMA-2020 (PRISMA, 2020). 288 Nikolaeva, Kotliar, Kamaleeva, Soldatova Interacción y Perspectiva. Revista de Trabajo Social Vol. 16(1): 2026 The review focuses on: (1) definitions and operationalizations of technostress and digital overload in education; (2) their relationship to well-being/sleep and learning outcomes; (3) places and ways of applying LLM/ChatGPT in teaching; (4) prevention and institutional support practices as tasks of social work in educational institutions. Data sources and search strategy and processing of the received data. The search was performed in international and regional databases: ERIC, SciELO, Redalyc, as well as in Russianspeaking eLIBRARY.ru and CyberLeninka. Time period: January 2018 — October 2025 Languages: Russian, English, Search string example (ERIC): (technostress OR “digital well-being” OR “information overload” OR “permanent connectivity” OR “LLM” OR “ChatGPT”) AND (student* OR undergraduate* OR “higher education” OR “social work”) AND (sleep OR “WHO-5” OR PSQI OR “well-being” OR “mental health”). Inclusion/exclusion criteria. Included were: empirical studies (quantitative/qualitative/mixed), review papers, and guidelines on technostress, digital well-being, and/or the use of LLM/ChatGPT in education; samples: students/faculty; presence of at least one relevant outcome (stress, wellbeing, sleep, academic outcomes, interventions/policies). Excluded were: comments without data, reports without peer review (except for authoritative manuals), publications before 2018, materials without an educational context. Duplicates were deleted automatically and manually. A two-stage screening (title/abstract, then full text) was performed by two reviewers, conflicts were resolved by consensus. Methodological quality was assessed using JBI checklists for the relevant research designs (https://jbi.global/critical-appraisal-tools); for included systematic reviews — AMSTAR 2 (https:// www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j4008 The review uses published open access/subscription data and does not require the approval of the ethics commission; however, the focus on social work requires careful description of the consequences for vulnerable student groups and institutional responsibilities for the prevention of technostress. RESULTS In the context of educational development, the problem of adapting educational practices to the current cognitive needs of students is complicated by a number of problems. In particular, the lack of necessary infrastructure, equipment and skills of teachers in the field of digital competencies, which was especially evident during the coronavirus pandemic and significantly hampered the educational process, as well as due to the rapid growth in society towards the development of programs based on artificial intelligence (Turanin & Posokhova, 2023). An example of automation and atomization of the educational environment is the development of educational courses on various platforms, such as Moodle. They allow students to watch video lectures, read texts, and complete assignments. In case of incorrect answers, they receive instant feedback, repeat assignments, and so on. With a number of advantages of such educational resources, students are deprived of the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in the educational environment, the possibility of joint epistemic search, and do not have the opportunity to get acquainted with individual learning styles. El impacto de la conectividad digital constante en la salud cognitiva y la responsabilidad social 289 Vol. 16(1) enero - abril 2026/ 285 - 293 Along with such resources, large language models (LLM), such as ChatGPT, have been actively used in the educational environment in recent years. These models have become a new means of obtaining and generating knowledge and are used to answer questions, generate essays, help with programming, search for information and other educational tasks (Abdullayev et al., 2024). The use of such systems has the potential for cognitive savings for students: some of the routine mental operations are delegated to AI, which saves time and mental effort for more complex learning activities. At the same time, the active use of AI is accompanied by the emergence of a new type of cognitive load. At the same time, students need to filter the answers they receive, verify their accuracy, navigate the generated content and critically evaluate such information. Thus, the introduction of such AI models into education not only expands the possibilities of obtaining knowledge but also leads to the need to rethink the forms of educational interaction and learning styles. In the context of modern education, it becomes obvious that digital educational resources actually perform the functions of Halcyon Skinner’s machine for learning grammar rules. The problem is that educational products and ways of organizing information do not match the pace of consumption and types of interaction with content. The discussion about the need to adapt educational content to the needs of students leads to a discussion about the gamification of education, which culminates in the requirements for teachers to develop gamified educational courses. In this context, it seems appropriate to return to the issue of the goals of modern education. Higher scores and higher average scores do not increase social responsibility, the ability to think critically, and the development of technical skills for interacting with digital devices is not equivalent to media literacy (Yakovleva & Konyukhovskiy, 2024). The ban on the use of artificial intelligence in education is counterproductive, since the development of this competence is becoming widely demanded in professional and everyday life (Belikova, 2024; Vassilchenko, 2024). Thus, the modern educational process should be aimed at finding harmony and interaction of the idea of mediumship with the digital risks of new temporality and the expansion of the space of creative presence. It is necessary to take into account that in a post-disciplinary, high-tech society, the coordinate system becomes highly dynamic, it is characterized by constant innovation and uncertainty. The formation of an integral structure of life in such conditions becomes extremely difficult. The value-semantic dominant becomes an unfolding business entity when a person exploits himself as a business project for the first time. Modern educational institutions at all levels are in a situation of necessary digital transformation (Turgaev & Turgaeva, 2024). Teachers take numerous advanced training courses on the specifics of implementing educational programs on digital platforms, creating online courses, modern pedagogical design, etc. All these processes demonstrate the specifics of the transition of social development to a new stage, called a post-disciplinary society based on the imperative of permanent innovation (Ehrenberg, 2009). The high speed and intensity of interaction between students and teachers in the digital environment necessitates a critical analysis of these phenomena. The digitalization of education has developed in line with the optimization of the educational process, rather than the humanization of curricula (Pertsev et al., 2023; Serebrennikova, 2024). How is it possible to develop education in the context of growing technological development, if there is a significant amount of research indicating the negative impact of media on the quality of education? (Kecherukova, 2021). 290 Nikolaeva, Kotliar, Kamaleeva, Soldatova Interacción y Perspectiva. Revista de Trabajo Social Vol. 16(1): 2026 We are in a situation of marginalization of such forms of cultural experience as attentive reading (the ability to discover meanings, “unpack” them, participate in their birth), writing texts in which we form our own thoughts, speaking — articulating our own position, reasoning, justification, requiring laziness, thoughtfulness, concentration. They are being replaced by practitioners who seek to sit down, grasp, and devote time to accommodate as many business activities as possible. This external hyperactivity, related to economic interests, is inevitably accompanied by a slowdown, the extinction of inner life and, as a result, the formation of a guerrilla personality, whose only status is the ability to be capital. In this context, the Institute of education and its main agents are considered as free entrepreneurs who organize their own activities as a competitive business, and establish contacts as business contracts (Danilova, 2024; Shichkin et al., 2024). DISCUSSION Acceleration and cognitive stress The American researcher A. Toffler conceptualizes the increasing speed of information exchange and consumption in his works. His futurological visions cannot be called optimistic, since the necessary high adaptability to transforming conditions is becoming an imperative for the subject of the Third Wave Society. Fatigue, inability to withstand prolonged emotional stress, increased irritability, apathy become a natural reaction of a person to the inhumanity of incoming information and literally put a citizen in a state of shock. The position of M. McLuhan, a classic of the Canadian school of media studies, can be described as dialectical. On the one hand, it allows him to relate to techno-utopians, since his concept of a ‘global village’ and the development of a new democracy fits seamlessly into a technophilic futuristic project in which technological development will solve most of humanity’s global problems. However, as the Russian researcher V.A. Kutyrev warns, the expectation of digital abundance led to the fact that ‘the Promethean attitude to the world surpassed the possibilities of life on Earth’ (Kutyrev, 2016, p.28). On the other hand, McLuhan’s work is an attempt to uncover the negative effects of human interaction with the media environment. The statement ‘media is a message’ confirms the inevitability of the effect of deception, hypnotic sleep, generating a new technological imperative. Canadian theorist A. Kroker reinterprets M. McLuhan’s four media laws (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988) and designates this ‘dark tetrad’ as a prismatic one, continuing the logic of J. Derrida. Kroker emphasizes that the development of information technology and the emergence of new types of interaction and infrastructure organization contain the “ghosts” of the old order, which begin to justify the processes of the new system. From the continuity of analog and digital media, for example, a kind of organization of a typewriter keyboard, video hosting to television, to the development of censorship tools for platform content, which translates the free exchange of content between users into the format of broadcast radio and television in the middle of the twentieth century. This leads to a situation where it becomes obvious that a person is in a posthuman reality, when technology defines his living space. “This is a historical moment when the power of technology turns against itself, actually undermining traditional concepts such as subjectivity, privacy and limited consciousness in order to make everything truly uncertain and El impacto de la conectividad digital constante en la salud cognitiva y la responsabilidad social 291 Vol. 16(1) enero - abril 2026/ 285 - 293 unknowable” (Kroker, 2014, p. 7). The only possible scenario for the return of humanity to man is the revival of humanistic values through the practice of social openness and solidarity. Cultural and emotional implications Bernard Stiegler, a representative of French philosophy, analyzes the post–industrial stage of society’s development and discovers that the “data economy” forms a new barbarism - a state in which the digital environment destroys social ties, leading to symbolic suffering (Stiegler, 2019). While most media researchers interpret the growth of anxiety as an inability to adapt to the rhythm of technological change, the American philosopher Charlie Kurth sees it as a source of personal development. According to the author, anxiety should rather be cultivated, since it can increase productivity, contribute to epistemological and moral success (Kurth, 2018). The digital overload of modern man, discussed in the article, once again raises the question of the future of humanism in the post-disciplinary era. This study attempts to analyze the impact of digital overload on modern network users. This topic remains relevant because, despite the volume of annually published works, the new digital reality is developing and continues to generate challenges and conflicts in various spheres of society that require research attention (Volosova, 2023; Fedorchuk et al., 2025). The onset of a negative scenario initiated by the development of digital technologies, the signs of which are identified in this work, corresponds to the established research tradition of understanding the new technological imperative. McLean’s idea is as follows: from the assumption that the environment is not neutral for the average person, and the media become an external extension of the person. It should be noted that, analyzing network transformations, researchers could not ignore this ‘biological’ effect of new technologies. The digital experience of the modern user is inseparable from the endless reproduction of anxiety and stress. CONCLUSIONS Constant digital connectivity and the spread of platform communications are redefining learning rhythms and ways of learning, increasing cognitive load and shaping the contours of technostress — from “techno-invasion” (blurring the boundaries of “study/personal”) to “technooverloading” and uncertainty associated with rapid updates. At the same time, LLMs (for example, ChatGPT) are being integrated into educational practices, providing cognitive savings and increased access to knowledge. However, when using such systems, a person is simultaneously required to develop new competencies aimed at verifying the knowledge gained, filtering and critically interpreting the generated responses. For social work, this means a shift in focus from narrow behavioral recommendations to institutional care: the formation of an “ecology of digital practices” and the creation of supportive environments that take into account the human scale and vulnerability of individual groups of students. From the point of view of social work, measures are needed at the level of microsocial, mesoand macropractice. At the micro-level, there is individual counseling and short self-help protocols: notification management and “silent windows”, sleep and screen time hygiene, LLM critical response verification algorithms. At the meso-level, there are group formats (workshops on digital well-being, trainings on media literacy and joint epistemic search, training agreements on “screen- 292 Nikolaeva, Kotliar, Kamaleeva, Soldatova Interacción y Perspectiva. Revista de Trabajo Social Vol. 16(1): 2026 less” periods) and coordination with teachers to rethink the pace and scope of digital assignments. At the macro-level, there are campus policies: “quiet hours” for LMS, guidelines on the volume and timing of online activities, ethics of using AI, antistigmatization and inclusive approaches for students with limited resources and increased vulnerability. Together, this strengthens the social responsibility of educational institutions and reduces the risks of technostress without blocking innovation. Limitations of the study. The review is narrative-scoping in nature and does not include metaanalysis; therefore, the effects are not aggregated quantitatively, and the conclusions are based on a qualitative synthesis of heterogeneous designs. There may be linguistic and publication systematic errors (skewed in favor of Russian and English sources and peer-reviewed publications). For further research, mixed methods, longitudinal designs, and evaluation of policies/interventions involving social work services in education are necessary. Declaration of conflicting interests The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest to any author. BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES •Abdullayev, I., Akhmetshin, E., Nayanov, E., Otcheskiy, I., & Lyubanenko, A. 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