On becoming a digital citizen...

Over the summer we've run a series of blog posts on the topic of digital citizenship, drawing upon material from the MOOC on Becoming a Digital Citizen which we ran last year. In this final post of the series, Susan Halfpenny wraps things up...

So what does it mean to become a digital citizen? In the first blog post in this series I stated that “the ‘digital citizen’ is a person who has developed the skills and knowledge to effectively use the internet and digital technologies”; someone who makes use of these technologies in a appropriate and responsible way to engage and participate in society and politics. Isin and Ruppert (2015) take this definition a step further, suggesting that if we constitute ourselves as digital citizens, we have become subjects of power in cyberspace: we are enacting ourselves on the internet, considering and understand the opportunities presented by this medium, such as anonymity, open communication, and participation across geographical boundaries. The digital citizen is also aware of the challenges presented by our information society and a post-truth era where governments have the technology for surveillance on a mass scale.

In this blog series we have considered some of the opportunities and challenges that digital communications technologies present. Is the internet of things presenting further opportunities for mass surveillance? Is anonymity really an option online, or are we risking being publicly shamed? We've looked at both the positives and negatives that technologies can present: how these technologies can be harnessed to improve communications and benefit societies, and how they can be employed to manipulate information and prevent participation. Through the exploration of these topics we can start to comprehend the complexity of our digital citizenship.

When writing our course on digital citizenship, the key concept we felt that resonated throughout all of the topics were ideas of evolution, change and development, and society. There is an interesting contradiction posed by the permanence of online transactions and the vulnerability of our online data. Revisiting this topic in blog form, these themes have once again become apparent. Once you start to explore some of the complexities of the internet and digital communications — and the ways in which they have influenced our behaviour as citizens — it raises more questions that require further consideration before we can state with certainty that we have become a digital citizen (or even truly understand what it would mean to be one).

The digital citizen is therefore a multifaceted beast, and what it means to become a digital citizen is open to interpretation: it changes dependent upon you perspective, reflecting your beliefs, values and ideals. In a sense you don’t ever become a digital citizen: it is a continual process of learning, engaging, and participating in our digital society.

We hope that this series has sparked your interest in how digital technologies have changed behaviour, society, and culture. If you are interested in finding out more about the digital society, why not join Stephanie and I as we embark on our new learning journey... into the world of digital wellbeing! In our new free online course, Digital Wellbeing, we will be exploring concepts of health, relationships and society in the digital age. If that sounds interesting, do feel free to sign up! We look forward to seeing you there...

Digital Wellbeing:
a free online course
15th October 2018