Over the past months, we called in experts from a wide variety of disciplines to reflect on how we can bring decency to our digital society. We threw down the gauntlet and saw that government institutions, civil society organisations and researchers rose to the challenge. They shared their solutions in seventeen separate blogs, brought together in this publication.
The blog series focused on four questions:
The authors reveal how they uphold public values, such as justice and autonomy, in an increasingly digital world and they encourage politicians, policymakers and IT professionals to do the same.
The insights generated by the series transcend their specific context, however. Those insights can be described in terms of four virtues that can help us deal decently with digital technology:
Please cite as:
Hamer, J. and L. Kool (red.) (2018). Decent digitisation - Seventeen experts on an ethical digital society. The Hague: Rathenau Instituut.
There are four virtues that can help us deal decently with digital technology, this report shows. These virtues are: 1) be personal, 2) modest, 3) transparent and 4) responsible.
These virtues are a good place to start, but they need to be incorporated into real solutions, such as technical applications, codes of conduct or statutory frameworks.
It’s high time for us to think about how to use digitisation to improve society, director Melanie Peters writes in the first blog in this series about Decent Digitisation. Read more. In the other blogs, experts will write about four issues.