Phenomenon Digitization

Digitalisation has brought with it major upheavals. The speed of the world has changed, especially that of communication. But digitalisation is not the revolution it is sometimes glorified as! There are still great continuities to the world as it was before and we should try not to mystify digitisation. A challenge I see is the knowledge gap that has arisen. We are surrounded by technology every day. Hardware and software and the understanding about it, about the things we use every day, is distributed very unequally and this creates problems. At the moment there is an unpleasant tendency to try to solve every problem that is actually of a social nature with technology and that doesn’t work. There are problems that can only be solved with human intelligence, and it is a bad idea to tackle actually social problems either with surveillance or with laws that, in case of doubt, are more likely to bring censorship than any solution. An example would be video surveillance: It is a lie that we so often encounter in everyday life that we, or many people, have already begun to believe it: an area is video monitored for security reasons. It is a fact that crime is not prevented. But what happens is that negative effects arise. Everyone is exposed to this surveillance. We don’t know where the data ends up. Whether the data is being transported safely and whether it will not at some point be in the hands of a perhaps authoritarian government, which is looking over our shoulders the whole time in public space.  People of my age and also parents still know that you go online. Younger people no longer know that. They are always online, all the time. There is a much more intuitive use of technology. However, the way we deal with it is very different. I think it needs enlightening. This is the knowledge gap that I just meant: on the one hand older people who actually use technology less intuitively, but also younger people who perhaps handle their devices and the platforms they use with less inhibition. What we are being told is that we want to improve the service, so we need your data. But the reality is that we are being sold off to advertisers. Whether from Facebook and Instagram, same group of companies, or from Google, which many people know as a search engine, but which is in truth just a huge advertising company with a huge power. It is good to see that awareness has now reached both schools and the Ministry of Education that, in terms of digitisation, teaching content is needed and technology must also be purchased in schools. But providing technology alone is not enough. There is no point in equipping an entire school with classroom sets of iPads if I don’t talk to the students about what I can do and what kind of company produced the hardware and software. Where does my data go? What data is actually generated when I use which programs on which website with this device. It would therefore be urgently necessary that teachers are also qualified, so that they can teach the students to decide for themselves, to decide maturely, what they do with this technology, with which they deal day by day quasi 24 hours.

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