So there's these three levels of digital inequalities:
inequalities in access,
the inequalities in terms of the skills that people have to engage with digital technologies,
and the third level has to do with the inequalities in outcomes that people from different backgrounds
or different regions of the world achieve from engaging with technologies
or that are the result of the digitisation of society more in general.
This debate and discussion around digital inequalities has been going on for quite a long time
and it started out at a certain point really talking about the digital divide,
which is, you know, who's in, who's out of this digital world
and we're talking mostly about the internet at that point.
This was really about having access to technologies.
But quite soon actually people started realising that
just getting access is not enough to be able to engage in a world that's increasingly digital
and we've seen this during the pandemic, right?
Where, yes, obviously access was very important.
But the other thing that the pandemic really threw in our faces was that, even with access,
there were a lot of differences between how people were able to get the most out of the technology.
One of the arguments that the book makes is that actually that last level of inequality is the most important
for that digital future that we're moving towards, where it's less about
conscious explicit use of devices and more about our everyday generation of data.
In this digital space where all the technology is embedded in all the objects around us,
every action that we take shapes that digital world, and not just for ourselves but also for other people.
Because in the offline world, if you open a door, the door doesn't change. It will still lead to the same room.
The door will be as visible for other people who come after us.
But in a digital world that's not the case. In a digital world, when I open a certain door,
or smile at a certain person, through an emoticon,
that person will become more popular. That door will become bigger, will become more visible to other people.
And so inequalities in this moment, when data is being generated to shape those technologies,
not just at the present, but of the future, are going to be very important for what comes next.
One of the other things that the book also really tries to do is to link this thinking about digital inequalities
to our more historical and traditional understanding of inequalities before technologies.
We need to theorise this more in depth because we know that there's all these different domains that we can be unequal in.
And it's likely that the causes of inequalities in these different domains are going to be different
and the consequences of it are different too and that means that also the solutions are different.
So the premise of the book and the work that we do is to look at how inequalities,
based on traditional and historical inequalities, get either amplified, as societies become increasingly digital,
or how they might be in some ways ameliorated by the implementation of policies
or of the use and the introduction of technologies into people's everyday lives in different ways.
One of the important things when we think about solutions
is that up until now there's been a relatively individualistic approach.
At the first levels of inequalities, obviously there individualistic interventions are extremely important.
If somebody doesn't have access, they need to get access.
However, as we move along more towards civic participation and social interactions and this more creation of content that
represents our own experiences and that gets heard by other people,
individualistic interventions become less and less effective.
What we've realised is that one of the main explanations for how people
engage with technology, what shapes their idea of what the digital world is like,
It's actually the social environment or the digital environment in which we grow up and in which we live our everyday lives.
And so what we see is that interventions that really work with those norms and values
are most effective in getting people to engage in positive ways with technologies.
This means, especially as societies become more invisibly digital,
that the emphasis cannot be on blaming the victim,
getting the people who are at risk of being left behind to get online and get the skills and start creating content.
Because a lot of these processes of exclusion take place by the better off, let's say.
One solution to create a more inclusive society, where people are able to engage equally with these opportunities,
is to actually focus literacy training to make people more aware that their actions impact other people.
So it's especially our responsibility to understand that and also to demand that from people who design technologies.
Here I come back to the premise of the book is in connecting social inequalities and the digital world.
It's really important that organisations that have tried to deal with social injustice
and social inequalities in the past get involved in this digital space.
And so if we can create a greater awareness in this kind of public discussion of
the way that we engage and interact with technologies kind of pushes some people to the side,
then actually that's a kind of a positive take to it, that we could say like, "OK, this is what's going on.
What is my contribution? What is my role? What is our role of an organisation?"
What I really hope is to combat some of these myths that exist out there.
In terms of technology having this universal effect, on everybody, in the same ways,
the kind of media panicky thing of, you know, "Digital media are destroying our lives."
That that is not the case that we can also say like, "Actually many people are able to get many positive things out of this."
But we need to be especially aware of who's not.