Seminar overview
Digital policy is currently high on political, communications and commercial agendas. Controversial areas such as copyright infringement, the future and functions of public service content, and the role of Ofcom are core issues. In the longer term the potential for economic transformations and growth through the digital economy, including the development of new skills, technological and industrial innovation and creativity, are at stake. This seminar series aims to bring together a distinctive mix of academic researchers at all levels, including research students, with policymakers and practitioners to focus on three key areas: connectivity, creativity and rights. The series aims to explore questions such as: What kind of digital future is envisaged in Britain? Who continues to be left out or at risk in this digital future? What can be done to overcome major technical, knowledge and skills barriers to this? What new kinds of creativity and innovation are being unleashed by digital change and how can these be expanded? How is the public service ethos being tested and enhanced in the digital environment? The series will consider connectivity from social and skills-based as well as infrastructural and technical perspectives
Some Key Points from the Seminar
Connectivity
- Challenge of linking the ‘convergence of things’ with academic research trajectories and regulatory demands.
- Shortage of appropriate data mapping the digital and creative economies to inform policy.
- Development of online public services linked to digital and mobile infrastructure and coverage and access to relevant technologies.
- Need to move public services online intensified by current budgetary pressures.
- Nexus of skills and infrastructure relevant to both building the digital economy and making it more inclusive.
- Current recessionary pressures impacting on digital economy including in cuts within the major broadcasters notably the BBC.
- Digital inclusion involves multiple user groups including older people and strategies need to reflect the diversity that characterises the issue. Engagement of communities fundamental to inclusion strategies.
Creativity
- Need to understand the ‘knowledge economy’ and the ‘creative economy’ as areas drawing on multiple academic disciplines across the social sciences, humanities and arts. Policy makers keen to link creative and business sectors.
- Central importance of economists in the interdisciplinary academic work to examine the ‘creative economy’ and its potential.
- Imposing regulatory paradigms on the Internet threatens to reduce its vitality and the potential for innovation.
- Pace of change impacts on all areas of digital policy and the nature of appropriate strategies to unleash innovation and economic dynamism coupled with increasing inclusion.
- Imaginative approaches to inclusion required including working in multi-sensory multi-user 3D environments. The paths to becoming a digital native are varied and experimentation can produce surprising results.
- Social context features strongly in digital possibilites: areas such as improved health and well being, freedom from isolation, increased community contact. ‘safe’ and accessible virtual socializing and tourism (for older people for example).
- The digital economy opens up wide-ranging opportunities in areas such as assisted living, leisure services including digital heritage, collaboration.
- Connected communities reach across the ultra-local (street) to the global and the local can be the most important for many stakeholders.
- Digital hybridity is at the heart of creativity, harnessing technologies to create, for example, augmented reality where real-time place is reconfigured or contextualized with images and information from earlier times. The hybridity can represent multiple configurations of time and place.
- Traditional institutions such as libraries are at the forefront of digital engagement and creativity with their emphasis on public access to information and archiving. Digitization expands accessibility including to stakeholders such as businesses and helps to fuel innovation. Digitization enhances and enriches content, expanding the uses of it in digital economy terms, including in reclaiming and reframing material from the past as much as the present. Distinctions between slow and fast, old and new, tangible and intangible, media and combinations of them to achieve ‘thick’ description in curating.
- Young/new creatives embedded in digital culture and economy impatient with analogue approaches and modes of operating are major drivers of innovation and new business models. But content and story at the heart of much digital output and these are traditional rather than new skills, while digital capabilities offer new forms and possibilities for them.
Rights
- Digital revolution still in relative infancy but clear how digital infrastructures increase political access and contribute to community building and democracy (e.g. processes evident in the ‘Arab spring’ movements and their use of social media to contribute to political change). Access to rights is increasingly technologically mediated. The Internet transcends and subverts many traditional boundaries around public and private spaces including politically. ‘Social’ media are increasingly influential in political and economic spaces.
- Challenges for the regulatory environment and the maintenance of standards in relation to content but also the multiplatform environment. What can be regulated? Protection of children, as well as protection of adults from economic exploitation likely to be paramount.
- Where should gatekeeping be sited, in the Internet Service Provider, in the household? New models of regulation are evolving where signposts and hurdles related to content are likely to be key.
- If informed choice is going to be a driver then digital literacy skills broadly defined come into play, especially in relation to young people. Information as well as media skills are part of this picture.
- Multidimensional soft and hard regulatory models with multiple stakeholders including different levels of government and user-centred dimensions.
- Are the policy processes sufficiently transparent?
- How do we define minorities in the context of digital economy? Primary data and bottom-up research required to develop policy-relevant understanding.
- Digital rights issues touch on all aspects of identity including language (English/Welsh), socioeconomic and cultural factors.
- Digital citizenship still being defined. How do we build online lives and identities and meanings attached to them? Digital literacy fundamental to education and skills. Empowerment, ethics and responsibility are all part of the picture as are the contrasts between formal and informal modes.
These notes have been compiled by Gillian Youngs and reflect her summary of some of the main points covered in this seminar. For further detail please refer to the full presentations at http://idl.newport.ac.uk/digitalpolicy.
Presentations from David Warrender, Iain Tweedale, Ian Hargreaves, James Moxey, John Goto, Khaled Galal, Lorna Hughes, Matt Chilcott, Panayiota Tatsou, Russell Roberts and William Dutton.
