New digital technologies present ever-evolving challenges to democracy and justice. Diversity and inclusion, civic participation and just decision-making are all on the line, with very few nations rising to the challenges.

It’s no coincidence that so many of The Philosophy Club’s workshops are concerned with cutting-edge technologies and their impacts — moral, psychological, social and political. From algorithmic decision-making, augmented and virtual reality, deepfake videos, and artificial intelligence, to anti-ageing technologies, human bio-enhancement, brain-to-brain interfacing, and genetic engineering, these technologies are seemingly full of promise. But they pose radical threats to established social conventions and raise daunting new dilemmas, both ethical and epistemological.

If we’re serious about enabling a digital democracy, we have our work cut out. Arranging equal access to connectivity infrastructure is just the beginning. We need a comprehensive program of digital citizenship education that transcends the usual framework of teaching how to evaluate online information for accuracy, relevance, authorship, purpose and bias.¹

Educating for digital citizenship is a far more expansive idea. Of course it should equip young people with information literacy and access to data relevant to public reasoning. But beyond that, it should help to restore trust in democracy by introducing resources for effective civic action:

Inclusive civic spaces (both on and offline) that serve the interests of a diverse society, empower marginalised groups, increase democratic participation and enable deliberative dialogue.² (As social scientist Brian Martin quips: “Deliberation rather than debate — that is radical indeed”. ) Education in collaborative philosophical inquiry has a distinctive role to play in modelling the conversational norms in such spaces, as I’ve previously argued.³

Digitally-facilitated modes of active civic participation in ‘post-representative democracy‘, including lobbying via e-petitions, online consultation processes, citizen laboratories and deliberative law-making and policy-making processes such as collaborative legislation, participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies (aka policy juries), people’s tribunals, and issue-based deliberative polling.

Accessible digital tools for activism to facilitate rallying activists around a cause, organising and empowering citizens, and mobilising street protests.

Digital platforms and apps, if wisely designed, do have the potential to strengthen democracy, but we should be wary of cyber-utopian thinking. No technology, real or imagined, is a silver bullet for our social and political ills. Environmental sociologist Mike Hynes warns against the “seductive notion… that information alone sets us free and that access to the internet with its vast stores of information will lead those oppressed by authoritarians into the light of democracy”. He notes that Western liberal governments, by “failing to rein in the immense influence, power and reach of big tech authorities… [have abdicated] their responsibilities to protect their democracies and, in turn, have left their citizens helplessly exposed to persistent misinformation, lies, fake news and manipulation on a vast scale.” 

Online interaction is replete with threats to individual autonomy and democratic integrity. These are well-documented, widespread and insidious. The slew of worries includes corporate surveillance, digital advertising, data harvesting, user profiling, and political micro-targeting; fake news, the amplification of conspiracy theories and the use of social media bots; filter bubbles and echo chambers leading to polarisation; arbitrary censorship; black hat hacking; and warrantless surveillance and data manipulation by state authorities. It’s a brave new world.

In the words of MP Sue Higginson, we need to put a defibrillator on the heart of our democracy.

Digital citizenship education should, at a minimum, alert young citizens about threats to their own privacy and data security, reveal how state and corporate surveillance can become a tool for social control, and indicate how vulnerable people are adversely and asymmetrically impacted by many digital systems. 

In our student workshops at The Philosophy Club, we’re contributing to digital citizenship education by offering sharp provocations on these themes, together with a supported space for students to discuss tough questions. Questions like whether maximising the personalisation of their online user experience is worth the inevitable sacrifice of privacy and the risk of reinforcing biases and tribalism. These questions jolt us out of our collective impassivity. They spark something more powerful than any software: inclusive, sage and healing conversations that can reverse democracy’s cardiac arrest.

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Notes:

¹ Even more troubling than subjecting students to these artificial limits is when educators generate false equivalences, such as between climate denial and climate concern, as a result of efforts to “counter the effect of bias on the reliability of information by actively pursuing a balanced perspective” (this being an educational goal identified during an information literacy session at the recent EduTech Melbourne conference). Equally concerning is when efforts to counter bias generate false dichotomies: for instance, when the speaker at the EduTech session described NASA as a reliable source for climate information and Surfers for Climate as an unreliable source, despite the fact that both websites cite matching information from recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

² I’ve previously reviewed the drawbacks of debate.

³ It’s true that inquiry dialogue and deliberative dialogue differ in their aims, with inquirers striving for individually-held reasonable belief, while deliberators seek consensual recommendations or action. But both kinds of dialogue require participants to question and collaborate. And both require participants to interrogate arguments, even ones that are superficially compelling, to identify instances where, as Brian Martin says, “some important evidence isn’t mentioned, some alleged facts are wrong or misleading, and the whole viewpoint is based on questionable assumptions and unstated value judgements [until what] seemed a solid edifice is revealed as a facade filled with holes and built on sand.”

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This post was inspired by the Center for Humane Technology’s excellent free online course Foundations of Humane Technology.

You may be interested in our other blog posts concerning citizenship.

For further reading on digital democracy, see John Gastil’s 2021 paper A theoretical model of how digital platforms for public consultation can leverage deliberation to boost democratic legitimacy. Journal of Deliberative Democracy, 17(1), pp. 78-89.

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The Philosophy Club works with students and teachers to develop a culture of critical and creative thinking through collaborative inquiry and dialogue.