Reflections on the challenges of asking normative questions about the digital society we want

Webinar series - Digital good in progress

Reflections on the challenges of asking normative questions about the digital society we want

New date: 11:00 - 12:00 Thursday 1 May, online

The ESRC Digital Good Network asks what a good digital society looks like and how we get there. We take as our starting point the substantial critiques of contemporary digital deployments offered by social scientists, humanities scholars, and digital rights advocates and activists. We acknowledge the rich empirical evidence of problems raised by, for example, social media platforms, biometric surveillance tools, and generative AI. In surveying these critiques, the contours of the digital society we don't want become clear. However, whilst mapping these contours is vital, it is only a start. The Digital Good Network takes the next analytic step, inspired by a vein of scholarship that challenges us to imagine more desirable futures (eg Benjamin 2024). In other words, we pivot from the question 'what digital society don't we want?' to 'what kind of digital society do we want, and how do we get there?'.

Over the past two years, we have funded research, trained researchers, and connected with stakeholders, in pursuit of answering these questions. At this juncture in our network's life, in this presentation, we reflect on some of the challenges that arise when asking normative questions like ours. We focus on what we see as aligned concepts - hope, promise, imagination - on good societies past, future and present, and on questions of language, noting that the term ‘good’ is highly contested.

We reflect on the convening power of the core terms we use, on their use as heuristics, and on category errors - or whether journeying towards a better digital society is more important than challenging whether it is possible.