Communities and their sociodigital futures

By Matt Dowse, Helen Manchester and Martin Parker

It often feels as if our social and digital futures are mainly being made by big tech companies in California, but can community organisations use digital technologies to make their own futures?

In our work with strategic partners Locality - the national membership network supporting community organisations - we have engaged with a wide range of voluntary and community organisations.

We want to understand better why communities care about sociodigital futures and what kinds of things they care about. We’ve started by asking ‘what matters now?’ in order to work from and with communities’ ideas rather than assuming that we, as academics, know what they want and need.

But why does thinking about the future matter?

Locality and their members work long term with communities who have and are experiencing multiple inequalities in the present moment.

For these groups, concern for everyday survival can seem to matter more than thinking about longer term questions.

But futures are always being made in communities – whether it is parents’ hopes for their children, social action projects around things that a community cares about or everyday making of futures through planting window boxes, having a collective garden or organising litter picking.

Through a series of initial meetings with a wide range of voluntary and community sector organisations we found that digital technologies are often blamed for all that is seen as negative in the social lives of communities.

It is common enough to blame increasing social isolation and division, mental ill health and spiralling inequalities on our over-reliance on social media, platform-based labour and online shopping.

Community workers were concerned too about ever increasing digital inequalities and injustices, a digital divide that means some citizens simply can’t access school work, state welfare provision and so on.

However, emerging technologies are also seen as having huge potential for positive social change through enabling different forms of connection, as a way of sharing and collecting meaningful data about communities and for supporting communities to imagine and build alternative collective futures.

The organisations we have spoken to recognise the importance of supporting people to dream about alternative sociodigital futures that shift away from a current focus on competitive, economic growth narratives.

They see the potential for opening up ideas around collective, collaborative projects and co-designing new kinds of digital technologies that might support this.

Indeed, our work shows that there are many community and voluntary sector organisations already working on this.

Our research spotlights a diverse and thriving network of activists working at the intersection of social activism and digital practices.

From leadership work in underserved communities, to seed sharing platforms, local food networks, and accessible online interpretation services, technology is being harnessed by passionate people who want to make a difference in their own communities. As one activist said

silhouette photo of person holding smartphone

“The tech isn’t the thing that comes first, it’s always about listening, responding. What’s the issue? What’s the thing we care about? What do we want to make and do together?”

As well as producing the digital technologies which have the potential to evolve and shape the social solutions that concern them, they also offer challenges to the “oven ready” tech which can’t adapt to their priorities:

“Anyone can go and look at the source code on our GitHub page. Anyone can suggest improvements. Anyone can propose changes to the code. And in that sense, it's putting the power back into the hands of the people that are using the platform”.

Matters of ownership, power, change, and representation are all present in the research that we are undertaking. We’ve talked to people who are doing work that is deeply political and personal, which challenges the abstracted, depersonalized black mirror of “off the shelf” tech. In this sense, these practices owe much to other DIY and alternative ways of organising.

“One of the big observations we had is that commercial type approaches weren't working …, and therefore the need for an alternative approach was huge.”

These approaches offer the potential to disrupt the tech that so often offers little or no public engagement in its design and purpose, concerned more with advertising revenue and data harvesting than social justice and equality.

Those people working in what we might describe as community technology practice occupy a position which claims and shapes their own sociodigital futures, acting to make these futures a reality. It seems to us that it is important that ordinary citizens are also engaged in the discussion about sociodigital futures.

Too often, technology is imagined as an inexorable force that determines the future of society. Our research suggests otherwise and that many activists across the country are busily showing us that other futures are possible.

Want to know more?

Listen to our podcast where the authors of this article discuss examples of community tech they’ve encountered, exploring how communities are creating their own sociodigital futures and discovering what can be learnt from community alternatives to big tech solutions.

Listen to the podcast