What a concept is in Digital Society, the seven concepts from change to values and ethics with a real example of each, and the kind of question each one brings to an inquiry.
From the subject guide: what you need to know and be able to do.
Big ideas used to make sense of digital systems and their effects.
Each one has its own page once something is published for it.
A concept in Digital Society is a big idea that can be applied to almost any situation and that gives insight into it. Concepts are powerful, because they explain a great deal; pervasive, because they appear in every area of life; and debatable, because people disagree about what they mean and how they apply. A concept works like a lens: the same digital system looks different depending on which lens is used to examine it.
A food delivery app shows how this works. Through the concept of power, an inquiry asks who sets the riders' pay and who can challenge it. Through the concept of space, it asks which neighbourhoods the app serves and how it changes the use of streets and kitchens. Through values and ethics, it asks whether the treatment of riders is fair. Each question depends on understanding what the app does, but none is about its code.
Each concept is also studied by particular academic fields: historians study change, anthropologists and psychologists study identity, and political scientists and lawyers study power. Using a concept well means thinking like a practitioner in one of those fields.
2.1 Change. Change is the movement from one form, state or value to another, and the debate about whether it is progress. The printed Encyclopaedia Britannica ended its print edition in 2012 after more than two centuries, as free online reference works such as Wikipedia took its readers.
2.2 Expression. Expression is the representation of ideas, emotions and experiences through different modes and media. In 2017 the #MeToo hashtag spread across social media in many languages, as millions of people shared experiences of sexual harassment and abuse.
2.3 Identity. Identity is what defines a person, group or community, and it changes over time and with context. India's Aadhaar system links a 12-digit number to the fingerprints and iris scans of more than a billion residents, so that a digital record now confirms who a person is.
2.4 Power. Power is the capacity to influence or control what others do, and it is built into institutions and unevenly shared. In 2017 the European Commission fined Google €2.42 billion for favouring its own shopping service in search results, a decision the EU's highest court upheld in 2024.
2.5 Space. Space covers how people organise, experience and move through physical and virtual places at local, national and global scales. China's Great Firewall blocks services such as Google and Facebook, extending national borders into online space.
2.6 Systems. A system is a set of interconnected and interdependent elements, where a change in one part can have unintended consequences elsewhere. In July 2024 a faulty CrowdStrike security update crashed about 8.5 million Windows computers, grounding flights and disrupting hospitals and banks around the world.
2.7 Values and ethics. Values and ethics are the ideas people use to judge what is right, fair, just and proper, expressed in codes, policies and laws. MIT's Moral Machine experiment collected about 40 million choices on how a self-driving car should act in an unavoidable crash, and found that preferences differed between cultures.
Each concept points an inquiry towards a different kind of question. The pairings are typical rather than fixed, and strong inquiries often use two or three concepts together.
Concept | The kind of question it raises |
|---|---|
Change | What is different before and after this digital system, what caused the difference, and is it progress? |
Expression | How does this system change who can express ideas, in what forms, and with what limits? |
Identity | How does this system define, display or reshape who people are, and whose identities does it recognise? |
Power | Who controls this system, who is affected by its decisions, and who can resist or change them? |
Space | Where does this system operate, which places and borders does it change, and who is included or excluded? |
Systems | Which elements does this system connect, and what intended and unintended consequences follow? |
Values and ethics | Is this system right, fair and just, according to whose values, and who decides? |
The concepts overlap. Power is closely tied to values and ethics, because asking who holds power soon leads to asking whether it is used fairly. Identity and expression meet whenever people present themselves online. Each subtopic in Topic 2 sets out one concept in detail and applies it to the technologies of Topic 3 and the contexts of Topic 4.
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