TRANSFORMING USAGE INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONTEXT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
In modern society, all processes take place in the conditions of intensively improving information and communication technologies. The changes caused by these technologies create an extremely rich information environment, affect all areas of everyday human life, transforming traditional social practices and generating new social practices. Thus, life in an urban environment is closely related to the use of computers and digital gadgets. The pandemic of the coronavirus COVID-19, which broke out in 2020, has become an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of modern society, which has changed the way of life of people and the usual rules for the functioning of the socio-economic sphere and activated digital technologies. Two trends in the transformation of mobile application use should be pointed out. First, the pandemic has spawned new types of mobile apps and dramatically transformed the way people use mobile apps. The second point, obviously related to the pandemic, is the change in the use of mobile applications. To identify the features of using mobile applications in December 2019 and December 2020, we conducted two sociological surveys of university students in Kazan. The data obtained indicate that the expansion of the audience of users of mobile applications, which occurred as a result of the pandemic and remained after the abolition of the self-isolation regime, is primarily characteristic of applications that allow you to order food in restaurants and cafes, food in stores, goods in stores, applications for call a taxi. Thus, the pandemic has led to an increase in the use of mobile applications to solve the problems of users related to shopping. In the future, this can contribute to the active use of other categories of mobile applications that serve to improve the quality of the urban environment.