The role of digital in balancing the cycle

My two previous posts present a worrying possible conclusion to the way we’re living and the impact that we’re having on our own social fabric and environment today. It’s always easy to criticise and find the negative in our situation, so I’ve been thinking about what we can do to improve the situation, and what role digital should play in that.

First on the list is to inform people. Most people willingly choose the best for themselves and others when they are furnished with the information to do so, unless they absolutely can’t afford to do otherwise. But even affordability is a matter of priority. Who would knowingly choose to feed their children food that they knew to be gradually poisoning them and risking future debilitating diseases if they correctly understood and assessed those risks. These decisions come down to being well-informed. And that’s one of the things that the Internet and digital communications are best at.

Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff is a great example. I’m not sure how visitor numbers have changed over the last couple of months since I first saw it, but the “Over 4 million viewers” label is pretty impressive. It’s clearly been designed for grass-roots distribution.

Here’s another example:
YouTube is obviously a brilliant application for viral distribution, and so are many of the other social networking sites, like Facebook, on which the embedded video was shared by many.

Second is providing access to choice. Being well-informed isn’t enough if you can’t choose the better option. Being here in Canada has provided a clear example. Food products containing genetically-modified crops do not have to be labelled as such either here or in the USA. I’m not going to wade into the GMO debate here and now (although I might well enjoy doing so in the future), apart from to say that at the very least, consumers deserve the ability to choose whether or not they purchase GMO.

The cross-border, niche-market possibilities offered by the Internet make providing choice much easier, and enable consumers not to be reliant on the large, multinational corporations who dominate physical retailing in so many parts of the developed world. Instead, digital channels provide a platform on which local artisans can reach a market for their products, and offer alternatives to the existing distribution processes and market dynamics. Etsy is a great example of this. Now imagine this kind of platform applied to hand-crafted or artisan-designed and –developed goods from developing countries.

Third, and most importantly, is democratising access to power, which sounds incredibly lofty, but needn’t be. It’s about giving local people more input on the decisions that are made locally. Frequently, the most important of these are town planning decisions, such as, should Tesco be given planning permission to open an out-of-town supermarket here? Where I used to live in Southwark, London, I would receive three to four invitations to local consultations per year. The consultations were always conducted as town hall meetings – usually at about 6pm. They were almost impossible for people working up in town to go to. These kinds of consultations are the ideal forum to open up to digital channels. The more we open them up, the more we expand the exchange of information with the local community and allow them to have an active say in the way their towns develop.

The big sticking point with all of these things is the digital divide. It could be argued that it is those who don’t have access who have the greatest need for the benefits that digital access brings: a subject for another day.