Let's Think About Digital Empowerment
Let’s think about digital empowerment, what it is and what it means. It’s not just a buzzword. It is a set of very real, practical abilities that are essential to liberty, prosperity, and wellness in today’s world.
Empowerment involves agency, autonomy, and control over one’s situation; it is constrained and defined by access to resources, including information and knowledge. What we know and can do are critical determinants of our well-being, so this is pretty important stuff!
One of the great progressions of human history has been the increasing availability of information — that which reduces uncertainty — and means to transform information into knowledge. We see this progression in our every day comforts and conveniences, our freedoms from disease and privation.
Digitization is but the most recent phase in that progress, which includes writing, printing, libraries, broadcasting, and, now, computer software and networks. It is simply the reduction of information to its essence, a mass of 1s and 0s, ons and offs, yeses and nos — bits — so it can be computed.
The essential nature of computation and digitization is quantization, the ability to measure and thereby manage information. Quantization makes data that is easier and less costly to analyze, copy, create, and use than analog information but also harder to control. Digitization requires a new set of human capabilities based on quantitative, computational thinking.
Digital empowerment is simply to ability to control, modify, and use all the bits that relate to you. This ability is critical to autonomy, one of the core human values, in today’s world. You cannot act in your own interests without information. Digital technology is simply a new arena in which such acts play out. The question is what role do you, the individual, play?
Access to and possession of information is essential belonging and competence, the other two core human values. Digital technology provides means and objects for both. Belonging has become digitally mediated. One cannot access social services without it and social media are digital technologies. Entirely new digital competencies are a pervasive requirement for modern life.
Digital empowerment has two aspects. The one that gets the most attention is the ability to get and use digital technologies successfully. The other aspect is the ability to live and operate without digital technologies. Usability and usefulness are goals for design and planning. Means to opt-out is a criterion. Dependence is not empowerment any more than exclusion is.
Both aspects require digital empowerment qualitative thinking. Both require understanding the how and why of digital technology. For what purposes do people want and need to use digital tech? How, in what manner and via what methods, might they use it?
The best tech is transparent to the task, which can only be achieved if both is defined and envisioned. What do truly accessible, usable, useful systems look like to users and non-users? Are non-users simply excluded from the universe of digital activities and information? To what extent must specialized, technical knowledge be required to realize benefits of digitization?
These questions can only be answered via direct engagement with users, listening to and learning from them. The how and why are totally qualitative.
Use of digital technology fosters computational thinking, which is all about working with data, i.e., quantified information. Computers are thinking tools. Quantitative analysis doe not require computers but they make much easier and more flexible. If you’re not interested in data and quantitative analysis, you may have no interest in computers or digital anything.
Digital empowerment requires knowledge of digital systems, and skills to build, maintain, and use them. Access to digital tools and information infrastructure are necessary but not sufficient without understanding computation — math applied to information. Not everyone can have such knowledge and skills, especially in much depth or detail. Therefore, it requires agents working on behalf of and beholden to others, including those who do not want digital assets.
Digital empowerment also involves freedom to not use digital technology, or any technology for that matter, without being substantively excluded from society. The ideal form of this is impractical, of course. The key consideration is whether one has the ability to use the technology without risk of problems due to losing access.
For example, what if you were unable to use a smart phone for some reason? How would you access essential services and participate in economic and social activities? It is very difficult to “rollback” to analog!
Digital access should not preclude analog access. Instead it should ease and enhance analog access. That is true digital empowerment.
So what does this mean in practice, in pragmatic terms for regular folks?
It means owning your data and other digital assets. It means having full control over your software, including the choice not to have any software. Ideally, it means the ability to have all data related to you erased but that’s not practical.
It means changing the ways in which we acquire software. Currently, we pay for software either directly in the form of licensing fees, or indirectly with our attention, which is manipulated based on data about us, meaning we do not own our data. And data is the most valuable asset in a digital world.
It means having the capabilities for digital assets. This necessarily involves learning. It requires having a say in how and for what purposes digital systems are designed and deployed, which requires open processes as well as knowledge. Some of this knowledge and skills will be highly specialized and technical, which not everyone needs or want so have, so…
It means access to others who have digital capabilities. The simple fact is that no one person is capable of everything. Regardless, interpersonal connection is a fundamental human good that digital tech should enable. Digital empowerment means connecting people with various skills, including providing greater access to capabilities for people who are not digitally engaged.
It means we need an agenda and resources for digital empowerment to ensure no one is excluded and everyone has the ability and knowledge to use digital assets and systems… or to not use them if they choose.
Such an agenda and resources will not come from giant tech corporations and government agencies. Tech companies have no interest in digital empowerment because it threatens their profits. Government agencies do not have to flexibility or knowledge let alone resources for digital empowerment.
More fundamentally, having private businesses or public agencies own our digital assets, allowing them set the agenda and control resources, means individuals do not have ownership and control so that situation is directly counter to digital empowerment.
OK, so are you ready for this?
Digital empowerment means establishing highly decentralized, personal and private yet highly interconnected, information infrastructure that enables anyone to access, control, create, delete, share, use, etc., digital assets, including data about their selves.
Crazy? Actually, most of the components of such infrastructure are readily available. Some key components, specifically health and financial data, remain problematic. And a few critical issues relating to digital identity, generally how to make it “unhackable,” remain unresolved but there are active initiatives to address them.
The ideas and realities I’ve laid out it this article represent a set of concepts, guiding principles, and hypotheses for digital empowerment. They are for Chattanooga.Digital and for any initiative that seeks to digitally empower people. I’ll be sharing more about such initiatives in the near future. Hopefully, the content of this post serves as something of a framework for making progress together.