Engaging the public with responsible technology
There is a power imbalance in the current tech landscape.
Digital technologies are present in every part of people’s existence yet are largely impenetrable. People have little chance to understand how and why tech affects them and few opportunities to shape their experience, either as individuals or collectively. For instance, 91% of the public say it’s important to choose how much data they share with companies but half (51%) can’t find out that information.
There’s now enthusiasm among both policymakers and business to change this. The UK Government’s Online Harms White Paper promises to ‘empower users to stay safe online’ with a new media literacy strategy, while Facebook has run a major ‘Privacy is Personal’ ad campaign and Google has developed ‘Be Internet Awesome’ tools for children.
Doteveryone’s been exploring what it would take for people to be both engaged and empowered – and to tip the scale of power between the public and tech.
Last year we ran our own pilot digital public health campaign Be a Better Internetter and found that it had some useful lessons about the challenges of public engagement: yes, there’s enthusiasm but it’s hard to know if it’s worked, get a specific enough message and empower rather than blame the public.
Since then we’ve explored in more depth where and how the public can drive change – conducting desk research, bringing together an expert roundtable and running online and face-to-face discussions with a community of 24 participants.
Our findings identify four principles that underpin effective public engagement in a digital age as well as three requirements for doing it well.
The four principles of digital public engagement
1. Public engagement must take place in tandem with regulation and industry change so that the public is not expected to shoulder the responsibility to tackle challenges alone.
People do want to shape their experience of technology – but they don’t want to do it alone. In our workshops people thought there was a shared responsibility between government, regulators, industry, society as a whole – as well as themselves as individuals.
2. Public engagement needs to focus on specific issues where there is a clear call to action to make tangible change. It should not ask the public to change the whole tech landscape in one go.
The Online Harms White Paper lists 23 areas of harm – ranging from child sexual exploitation and terrorist activity, to cyberbullying and intimidation. Each of these alone is complex and rooted in both tech and non-tech issues.
Taking the example of the S.H.A.R.E checklist, the publicly funded campaign asks a lot of the individual without being able to offer a specific outcome.
3. Engagement needs to recognise many publics – people begin with different mindsets and will respond differently to any initiative.
From the workshops, we identified four different mindsets in people’s perceptions of harms based on the combination of their actual digital understanding and their own confidence in engaging with technologies. These are: overwhelmed, in denial, realistically cautious and actively managing.
Each of these mindsets presents a different interpretation of the ‘problem’ technology can pose: the ‘overwhelmed’ may catastrophise issues to the point of retreating completely from using services, while those ‘in denial’ can disparage others who are affected by online harms as ‘idiots’ and ‘phone zombies’.
4. Public engagement needs metrics for success and must be deployed with the same care and rigour that would be applied to any change in regulation or business practice.
Doteveryone’s Better Internetter adverts generated 2,187,000 impressions in the first month of launch and the associated website received 81,332 visits over the following three months. These are great numbers – but what we don’t know is whether people had understood the messages, acted on them and whether that had translated into any sustained behaviour change.
Most public engagement fails to evaluate what impact it’s had – whether for good of bad – so there’s no benchmark for what effective initiatives look like.
The three requirements for good digital public engagement
1. Provide opportunities – public engagement must meet people where they are, with opportunities to act embedded into products and services.
Even our workshop participants felt that while they ought to tackle issues, they frequently found they struggled to take on that responsibility in practice – the opportunity to change behaviours didn’t exist.
When we asked them to try to change their settings, one responded:
It was a really confusing layout, going in through the apps and then another layer of apps. There was no explanation of how changing the settings would impact my user experience or my experience of the apps. I was reluctant to change any settings at all as I wasn’t sure what I was doing!
And some felt that the only way to change their relationship to tech was to use it less – and that’s not realistic.
2. Meet capabilities – public engagement should be specific to the issue and tailored to the individual’s capability and mindset.
We showed our online community some safety tips from SiteLock – and got very different responses:
A lot of my security ignorance comes through the jargon involved which often leaves me as much in the dark as before I started reading. This site is brilliant in that respect.
I’m familiar with most of the content. Although useful for me and others with my level of experience I can see some users ‘switching off’.
These reactions reflected the different mindsets we’d identified and show public engagement that works for some won’t work for others.
3. Aid motivation – public engagement needs to enhance and not detract from current online experiences and create feedback about the impact of any action, creating the motivation to act.
People use their devices from the moment they wake to last thing at night (and even in the middle of the night). Any attempt to change people’s behaviour must overcome these ingrained habits. When we asked research participants to try out some tips to change their behaviours, motivation was a big challenge.
I only managed to stay away from Facebook or Instagram for a couple of days. I was away visiting family so thought it’d be nice to switch off and disconnect from the world for a bit but in the end I couldn’t resist the temptation as I was getting bored and to kill time and keep myself entertained I felt the need to go back on them.
Why public engagement is not enough
The principles behind public engagement and the requirements to do it well are necessary. But they are not sufficient. Technological disruption has ripped up the rules and norms of society – not just for people but also for government and for business.
Rethinking public engagement is not enough. To achieve a new and fair settlement for the future requires a broader project to rethink the social contract for the digital age. That means giving the public not just awareness but agency – the power to act on their understanding, to hold tech companies to account for the impacts of their products, supported by a digital social infrastructure.
“This is for everyone!” declared Sir Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web he invented. And it is for everyone – government, business and the public as a whole to shape a fairer future for an inclusive, sustainable and democratic digital society.
- An independent tech regulator must establish a robust system of redress to give the public a clear avenue to hold technology companies to account and reshape the current power imbalance.
- The Office for Civil Society should commission research into the gaps in public advocacy around the impacts of tech-driven change to design the activities of a digital public advocate.
- The Government should base its forthcoming media literacy strategy around new models of public empowerment that:
- Provide opportunities – meeting people where they are, with opportunities to act embedded into products and services
- Meet capabilities – are specific to the issue and tailored to the individual’s capability and mindset
- Aid motivation – enhance and not detract from current online experiences and create feedback about the impact of any action, creating the motivation to act.
Alongside our ongoing work to develop a one-stop-shop for digital redress Doteveryone is exploring new programmes of work that will help achieve these recommendations. If you would like to be involved please contact: [email protected]