Digital Society

The Digital Society programme builds upon previous work such as the British Academy’s COVID Decade report, which examined the long-term societal impacts of COVID-19 and touched upon the impact of digital inequalities during the pandemic and the value of digital infrastructure for local and hyper-local community responses to COVID-19. Other previous projects include our partnership with UCL Public Policy on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work, and our Childhood Policy Programme, which touched upon the impact of digital technologies on children, and our project on Data governance.

The first project the Academy undertook in this programme was an independent project on digital technology and inequality, commissioned by the Government Office for Science in 2022. This project explored the relationship between digital inequalities and existing societal inequalities and examined how advances in digital technology can mitigate or exacerbate existing inequalities, as well as how existing inequalities pose challenges for access and skills related to digital technology. The Academy also engaged in a variety of activities around the UK AI Safety Summit in 2023.

Following this project, in late 2023, the British Academy began a four-stage, multi-year programme around ‘What makes a good digital society?’ This programme set out four consecutive stages of work to address this question, examining:

1. Possibilities; What are the possibilities of a good digital society?
2. Principles; What are the principles that underpin a good digital society?
3. Processes; What are the processes and mechanisms available to implement the principles of a good digital society?
4. Practices; What does a good digital society look like in practice?

The sections below provide more information on the various activities in the Digital Society programme.

Activities in this theme are overseen by our Digital Society Working Group of British Academy Fellows and relevant academic or policy experts.

The British Academy is opening a call for evidence on the principles that might underpin a good digital society. The Academy’s public policy team is conducting a mapping exercise of the landscape of principles – across contexts including policy, academia and research, industry, and civil society and at both national and international scales – for ‘good’ digital or AI policy, design, or innovation.

Our first set of major activities in our Digital Society theme focused on technology and inequality. In early 2022, the Government Office for Science asked the British Academy to conduct a project on the topic of technology and inequality to improve our understanding of how government can play a key role in supporting access to, uptake of, and investment in technologies that can be critical to delivering broad public objectives, in a way that ensure inequalities do not become entrenched.

The year-long project was led by a Working Group that included Professor Helen Margetts FBA (Alan Turing Institute; Oxford Internet Institute), Professor David Hand FBA (Imperial College London), Professor James Nazroo FBA (University of Manchester), and Dr Carrie Heitmeyer (Government Office for Science).

The work focused on understanding the relationship between digital inequality and existing social inequalities. It examined how advances in digital technology can mitigate or exacerbate existing inequalities, as well as how existing inequalities pose challenges for access and skills related to digital technology. Insights from this project informed a review of policy options regarding effective deployment of digital technology to achieve public objectives in the context of complex inequalities.

The British Academy has engaged in a variety of activities around the international AI Summits, including partnering with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology on an event in the build up to the 2023 UK Safety Summit, and holding events as part of the AI Fringe in both 2023 and 2025.

A set of discussion papers commissioned by the British Academy. We invited contributions from across the Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy (the ‘SHAPE’ disciplines) to explore the question, ‘What are the possibilities of a good digital society?'

A series of workshops facilitated by the British Academy. We convened researchers, policy and industry stakeholders to explore the challenges and opportunities of online data access for SHAPE research.

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