06 Nov Digital transition: what are the challenges for the voluntary sector and Continuing Education?
It was in the 90s that the first wave of the Internet hit our associations. We had to have a website to present our missions and increase the visibility of our actions. It was at this time that a young start-up, Google, was born. The company owes its runaway success to the power of its search algorithm. Today, these famous automatic calculations punctuate our daily lives, and those of our audiences. It’s not a question of rejecting everything out of hand – we don’t have the means to do that anyway. It’s a question, at our level, of giving shape to this movement by decoding it. It’s also about committing ourselves to fundamental values such as defending our (digital) freedoms and making conscious choices about the way we get information, how we buy, how we entertain ourselves and how we access culture.
The recipe for the operation of privately-owned ‘traditional’ media is based on a very simple formula: attract attention with spectacular information and present advertising messages in the same package. One of the first people to implement this recipe was the founder of the Sun daily newspaper in New York in 1983. The circulation of the existing newspapers, the New York Enquirer and the Morning Courier, did not exceed 2,500 copies. They cost 6 cents. Benjamin Day launched a daily newspaper packed with news for six times less. It was a huge success. Today, something radically new is happening. The major industrial players on the Internet are still operating on the same principle, attracting attention in order to offer goods and services for purchase, but they are doing so thanks to the massive collection of user data, in an increasingly rapid (close to real time) and personalised way (this is the business model of Google and Facebook), and with the strategy of suggesting things that we like, but which we wouldn’t necessarily have thought of. Thanks to the algorithms that digest all the traces we leave on the Internet, which they compare with those of millions of other users to produce behavioural profiles. The power of recommendation is there. We can criticise it, but it will not disappear. Our role as an association is to influence it and, at our level, to formulate counter-proposals.
Deciphering
It’s not a question of becoming a computer scientist, but of becoming aware of what’s happening and decoding it. Today, the digital industry is producing increasingly powerful systems for anticipating our thoughts and desires. When you start typing search terms into the Google search engine, you are instantly presented with a list of suggested results that may guide you towards the right answer, or cause you to change your train of thought. This list of results is not displayed by chance. It is the product of automatic calculations, the famous algorithms, which have been written by programmers according to precise specifications and criteria. All their work at the moment – and it’s a race against time because the revenues involved are on a par with Google’s – is to extend the ‘intelligence’ of these calculation systems to the maximum amount of data available: the traces we leave on the Internet, but also our movements via geolocation and the way we live via connected objects. By becoming aware of and analysing these processes, we are in a way regaining some control over our choices. And we can work to develop this autonomy in our audiences.
Getting involved
We can also get moving. By definition, associations lack the resources. Obliged to keep up with the information technology movement, to become more professional and to communicate, they were initially forced to sign up to the monopoly set up by Microsoft. With too little money, there was a lot of unlicensed copying. A few associations, including CESEP, chose to promote an open and free technology: free software. With little success. At the time, programmes were harder to install and use, less functional and less user-friendly. There was the political aspect, of course. Free software is based on openness (we know the grammar of the code) and everyone can participate in the development of software that respects privacy. There was also the economic aspect: unlike MS Office, its equivalent LibreOffice is free. That was before SocialWare, a non-profit organisation set up in 2007 by Bernard Martin, the former director of Compaq Belgium, which offers associations access to the Microsoft suite and a few other proprietary software packages at cost price, excluding administrative costs. Today, more than 8,000 associations have signed up to the programme.
ALTERNATIVES
All of a sudden, the interest has been put into perspective. Without wiping the slate clean, without of course excluding the free, high-performance services of a Google or the broadcasting power of a Facebook, associations have a role to play and a position to take. Wherever possible, they should favour open source solutions. The main obstacles are time and resources to install applications and train users. There are, however, relays, such as the Linux users’ associations (LUG), present throughout the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, which organise mornings of meetings and installations (free and fun) of this software. Or the Abelli association (Belgian Association for the Promotion of Free Software), which organises an annual information and awareness day on free software for associations. This year, it is due to take place on 20 October at PointCulture’s Botanique premises.
Raising awareness of societal issues
Marc Van Craesbeek, director of Abelli: “The challenge is to raise awareness of the societal issues surrounding the consumption of digital products. Personally, it’s by using free applications and through the free community that I’m gradually becoming aware of these issues. Developing a rational attitude to digital tools is at the heart of my investment at Abelli. Education about the Internet and its risks is becoming increasingly important as the ignorance of Internet principles is exploited by a few companies that think they can get away with anything. Fake news, rumours and disinformation have always existed. The Internet gives them a prodigious platform for dissemination. Thinking about IT in terms of this prism and making our audiences aware of it is a major challenge for the Continuing Education sector.
More critical and humane recommendation systems
The other challenge is to use digital technology to develop more “critical and human” recommendation systems to counter the power of commercial algorithms. This was the thrust of a day of “brainstorming and building non-market alternatives” organised by Point Culture on 24 May as part of its series of conferences entitled “pour un humanisme plus critique et humain” (“for a more critical and humane humanism”). The idea: how to use free software so that our associations can have an impact, on their own scale and locally, in the face of suggestion and recommendation systems based on algorithms. For Pierre Hemptinne, director of cultural mediation at PointCulture, it is unacceptable for automatic calculation formulas to measure access to cultural goods for commercial purposes. So we need to form a network to open up the game, to surprise, to branch out, to work together to create cultural commons that are not under commercial control.
Thinking about digital time
The final challenge we face as an association is to reflect on the impact of digital time on our organisations and our audiences. Because everything is moving so fast, so fast that we are in danger of focusing only on that, forgetting what is essential. Pierre Hemptinne: “One of the problems, which is presented as the main positive advantage of digital technology, is direct access. You have direct, rapid access to what you want to hear, see or buy. But in return, and without it being made explicit, this gives you direct access to yourself. You eliminate as many critical filters as possible. Perhaps we can even consider that this discredits any critical work in itself. This collection of data on the tastes and colours of each and every person also allows cultural practices to be instrumentalised in a way that was unimaginable just a few years ago. The digital prescription for consumption is imprinted on people’s neurons, shaping their minds and determining the forms of intelligence that will be available in the future”.
Against the dictatorship of the moment
Pierre Hemptinne: “These days, everything has to move fast. We’re looking for the buzz. But if we want to build a different society culturally, we have to take things slowly. It requires detours, latency, complex reflexive itineraries… The problem is that the politics of the mind is in the hands of those who intend to exploit the human mind according to this short-termist logic, and no longer at all on the side of a ‘public vision’ that is primarily thought out for the common good, in the long term, taking the time to examine the consequences of what is being put in place. The speed with which things are happening, which we are fed in a kind of adoration, is not inevitable, it’s a strategy to occupy the field. There is an urgent need to defend slowness…
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