Digital systems and data play a central and increasing role in all aspects of everyday and working life. The digital no longer exists as specific, isolated technologies but as infrastructures that influence and shape organizations, societies, and individuals on many levels and in ways that we do not fully comprehend. Thus, the digital is omnipresent and interwoven with life, behavior, and consciousness. The digital is ontological.
Furthermore, there is growing awareness of the negative consequences of the digital for democracy, public discourse, and interpersonal, social relationships.
Finally, there is a prevailing understanding among political, business, and technology-developing actors that digital technologies should ideally be efficient, improving, and 'invisible' background resources that do not create problems or unnecessary attention. Yet, we repeatedly experience that digital technologies have unintended consequences. This paradoxical situation cannot be resolved but must instead be existentially managed.
Based on this, the purpose of the project is to increase individual and collective awareness, resilience, and agency in the encounter with digital technologies, grounded in the idea of digital technology as 'significant others' (Haraway). This means viewing them as things and actors with whom we, as users, engage in co-creative, mutually transformative relationships that involve joy, pain, doubt, and more.
The project's intention is also to develop and test formats such as workshops, experience sharing, and discussion proposals, which can contribute to achieving agency and resilience when interacting with digital technologies as situated practices, rather than as purely solution- or design-oriented. In doing so, digital citizenship is strengthened.
As part of the project, two workshops have already been held in the spring 2023 and the winter 2024. In addition, an agreement has been made with Folkeuniversitet (The People's University in Denmark) to conduct a workshop under their auspices. The plan is also to hold a workshop under the auspices of Circle-U.
The plan is to publish 1-2 research articles about the project, as well as other materials that can be used in association and educational contexts, for example, in the subject of Technology Literacy in primary schools.
