Educating (critical) citizens in a digital society

Published in Digital Youth Work: A Finnish Perspective. Verke, Helsinki 2017. 

The fourth digibarometer was published in June 2017. It is a survey that measures the degree of digitalisation in different countries on three different levels: preconditions, current utilisation, and the effects of the utilisation. It is published by Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications together with Tekes – The Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, Technology Industries of Finland, and eCommerce Finland. Finland was the runner-up in this year’s barometer, down one place from last year. 

Pekka Rouvinen, CEO of Etlatieto by whom Digibarometer was conducted, com- mented on the results by suggesting that in order to improve its position, Finland must focus, among other things, on citizens’ digital skills (Helsingin Sanomat 2017). 

Citizens’ digital skills have been advocated in similar circumstances before. For example, the Digital Agenda for Europe (2010) by the European Union promotes a skill called digital literacy as one of its development areas in the 2010’s. Digital literacy is described as a pivotal skill because people need to know how to use digital technology in order to function as customers on online markets and as employees in the growing ICT sector. In other words, digital skills are important in speeding up economic growth. 

Certainly, there is a need for novel expertise and understanding in relation to digitalisation. For the past decades, software and code have become an integral part of our daily routines, social communication, cultural experiences, media consumption, and almost all areas of society from administration to economy, politics, law enforcement, and research. This process, through which software has obtained its current ubiquity, has been called ’softwarization’, and our society has been described as programmable. 

I argue that the aforementioned administrative and business visions on digital skills bring only little insight to the nature of digital technology. They do almost nothing to help us understand the meaning of digitalisation in our everyday lives and the society. It might even be that such efforts to define the content of technology education distort or silence core issues that are essential for digital citizens. 

Hence, there is a need for educators and youth workers who bring the much-needed critical stance into the discussion as well as educational practices. I present here the idea of critical technology education (see e.g. Saariketo 2015). It is an approach that challenges mainstream ideas of digital education as solely adapting to existing technology and equipping people with skills needed in order to use technologies effectively (to enhance economic growth). 

The objectives of critical technology education are to support (1) understanding technology’s role and meaning in everyday lives and the society, and (2) constructing alternative technologies and technology related practices. Instead of assuming ‘digital’ and ‘technology’ to be neutral concepts or something that can be harnessed to fulfil the needs of educators or the economy, the focus should shift to how technology alters our perceptions and thinking. The design of digital environments and devices, as all design practices, is guided by a set of interests, values, and ideologies. What kind of power structures does technology construct and maintain? Who benefits from technology? What kind of values does technology create, and how does it alter existing ones? 

Even though software-based technology is a central part of our daily routines, it is often disregarded and accepted as it is without questioning. It seems that due to the prevalence of software, it is taken for granted and ignored. For example, the abstruse terms of use of social media platforms have become insignificant partly due to the close and personal relationship we have with technology. The conditions of the platforms become imperceptible also due to design that is meant to act inconspicuously in the background. The challenge for technology educators is to make software and its logic visible and bring it to the centre of attention. 

Google and its search engine serve as a good example to consider more closely how our everyday technology conditions our lives. Google.com is the most visited website in the world (Alexa 2017), and every second the search engine is used almost 60,000 times (Internet live stats 2017). The company has an undisputed dominant position regarding how we search for, organise, and understand information in the 2010’s. The search functions developed by Google define how online information becomes discoverable and accessible. In June 2017, it was announced that after seven years of investigations, the European Union fined Google 2.4 billion euros for manipulating search results. The company had directed users to its own shopping comparison service and deprived rival sites by pushing them down in the search results. As search engines are more widely relied upon in obtaining information, critical technology education is needed to better understand how search engines work, and how they organise information. It is important to comprehend that information retrieval in the sense we have become accustomed to, say, in a library, is not essential for Google, as its interests are based on advertising. Then, how should we conceptualise information provided to us by search engines? 

Administration and business advocates promote a future that is ever more dependent and based on software technology. They speak for digital education that conforms us to existing technologies and provides us with suitable skills needed in advancing economic growth. The purpose of critical technology education is to develop an understanding of technology that enables imagining and creating alternatives. I claim that strengthening agency in a digital society requires understanding the terms of digitality. There is a need for conscious evaluation of the technology we want to live with.