Digital literacy
Where we learn what digital literacy is, and how its absence can lead to the worst dystopias
Back in high school I read the famous political fiction “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell. The book describes a totalitarian state in which everybody is perfectly in line with the regime’s thought, while a “thought police” tracks down “thinking crimes”. I read it way before the actual year 1984 and since no such a dystopia seemed on the horizon, I enjoyed the novel as pure fiction. But I was proven wrong.
Only a few years later, in 1989, the now forgotten Fichenskandal became public in Switzerland. It revealed that the Swiss state had secretly introduced a physical mass surveillance system to trace anti-Swiss elements in the population. In fact, for a period of about 10 years the state had collected nearly one million paper files of Swiss individuals in secret archives! And the most Orwellian part of it: there was even a fiche on my family.
Fast forward to the present. A few months ago we learned of the mind-boggling Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company outrageously analysed 87 million Facebook profiles and used the billions of data points for targeted political advertising. It was rightly commented in many newspapers around the world that the analysis was done without a clear consent and awareness of the users. But, how could users be aware without knowing what can be done with their personal data in the first place? Or more generally, is it possible for a user to anticipate such abuses without a better understanding of the digital world?
The last decades have shown an unavoidable and rapidly growing necessity for all of us to deepen our basic understanding of the digital world. In fact, similarly to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who introduced incentives to teach the Swiss population to read and write in the 19th century, we now need a national push to bring everybody to understand the basics of the digital world. Because in my opinion there is no doubt that this new form of “digital maturity” will be essential to allow citizens to understand what can be done with their personal data, and thus be aware and in control of data abuses.
However, digital literacy has still a long way to go, and it clearly does not concern only the man or woman in the street. The hearings of Mark Zuckerberg in the US Senate, which followed after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, strikingly illustrated that also top politicians are still digitally illiterate. For example, one US senator actually asked how Mister Zuckerberg can sustain a business model in which the users can subscribe for free, implying zero understanding for new digital business models! And another senator asked how many “data categories” Facebook collects.
A digital understanding will thus be crucial for all citizens in the future in order to guarantee a proper functioning of states. If not, a dystopia like “Nineteen Eighty-Four” might actually become reality one day.
