What is digital society?

Information age, computer age, post-industrial society, network society, fourth industrial revolution.

Access, use and skills are unevenly distributed, so people under the same infrastructure live very different digital lives.

That services and knowledge work have replaced manufacturing as the main form of employment.

The ITU estimated in 2023 that around 2.6 billion people had never used the internet.

Access (can you connect at all), use (how, how often, how well), and skills and outcomes (what you can achieve online).

Around 2.6 billion, on the ITU's 2023 estimate — roughly a third of the world.

Impact: some people cannot get online. Implication: services designed for the majority make the excluded minority poorer and less visible.

Rural against urban coverage, income and shared devices, age, disability, language, and in several regions gender.

Integrated circuit (1958), microprocessor (1971), personal computer (1981), the internet (ARPANET 1969), online social networks (2000s), mobile and cloud (2007 onwards).

The internet is the network of networks. The web is ONE service on it — linked documents fetched by a browser. Proposed 1989, public 1991.

A whole processor on one chip, so computing could be embedded in other products instead of occupying a room.

Smaller and cheaper, and more connected. Almost everything else in the course follows from those two forces.

A single binary digit — 0 or 1. The smallest unit of data.

Eight bits, giving 256 possible values.

A circuit can tell on from off reliably even as voltage drifts; ten levels would make errors far likelier.

Exact copies, compression, encryption, and storing text, sound and images in one system.

Analogue is continuous and may take any value in its range; digital is discrete and takes one of a finite set of values.

Measuring a continuous signal at intervals and recording each measurement as a number, so it can be stored digitally.

Sample rate (how often you measure) and bit depth (how finely each measurement is recorded).

It is more robust — copies do not degrade. It is not automatically more faithful: a digital recording is always an approximation.

The conversion of analogue data or information into a digital form.

Media decay, format obsolescence, hardware obsolescence, and link rot.

Formats and media keep dying, so the material must be migrated indefinitely or the copy becomes unreadable.

What gets scanned first is what later gets found, cited and taught; the unscanned quietly becomes invisible.

The use of digital systems to change the structure or operation of an organization.

Digitization converts the MATERIAL and leaves the process alone. Digitalization changes the ORGANIZATION — roles, structure, model.

Cost, speed, reach, and the data every digitalized process produces.

Exclusion of users, fragility when one outage stops everything, deskilling of staff, and surveillance of workers.