Digital Society was a corporate and research network that aimed at bridging the gap between academia and industry to induce sustainable digitization and support knowledge sharing and cross-disciplinary collaboration between professionals in research and industry as well as students.
All the activities of the network centered around the three grand challenges of DATALAB. These challenges helped create the basis for student and research projects, dialogue forums, debates and seminars, all of which were to foster new knowledge, tools and processes as well as guidelines and political memorandums to fuel changes towards a social sustainable digital society.
In the recent years, we have focused on how society have become a surveillance society and how privacy is dead. At the same time, regulators in the EU have tried to reinscribe privacy on the legal and political agenda but still we see thousands of incidences of identity theft and illegally circulated content by third party.
How do we go beyond surveillance and privacy and address this challenge in a new way?
In contemporary digital society, content is difficult to monetize because we see large international players such as Google and Facebook functioning as content portals and we see a mobile culture where devices are customized and ads therefore intrusive.
How does quality content survive in the digital society? Do users want to pay for content, what kind of content, and does that correspond with the content that we need as a society?
Governments and companies are increasingly datafying their citizens and users, processing and making decisions through algorithms, but do the developers of algorithms hold too much power?
How do we make sure that we use data in the most optimal way? Is seemingly objective processing of big data sound or is it subjected to (political) decisions by the developers that are kept too opaque? And if so, what are the societal implications of issues such as inclusion, democracy, and access, and how do we improve this?
Our philosophy behind the network was that by collaborating as joint forces across research and industry, we can think broader and deeper and thereby provide better digitization.
We adopted a straightforward approach to collaboration by drawing on each other’s knowledge and expertise, for instance in connection with panel debates, case studies, seminars, Master’s thesis projects and so forth. This approach gave our researchers insight into the challenges present in the industry, and in turn, companies and organizations gained access to a solution-oriented forum for reflection as well as research-based knowledge, new ideas, and inspiration.
Digital Society was part of BRANDBASE – one of the 22 innovation networks that received funding from the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science in 2013 and was approved by the ministry in 2014-2018.
