What a context is in Digital Society, the seven contexts from cultural to social with a real example of each, and how one technology raises different questions in different areas of life.
From the subject guide: what you need to know and be able to do.
Areas of life where digital systems have an impact, from culture and the economy to health and politics.
Each one has its own page once something is published for it.
A context is the area of life in which a digital system has its effects. Concepts give insight and content explains the technology; contexts situate an inquiry by showing where the impacts happen and which people and communities feel them. The same system can matter in one way to a farmer, in another to a voter and in a third to a patient.
Topic 4 names seven contexts. They are broad on purpose, so that any real-world example, including one never studied in class, can be placed in at least one of them. Most examples sit in several at once: a social media platform is a business (economic), a place for friendships (social) and a channel for election campaigns (political).
4.1 Cultural. How people express themselves and how they live, travel and associate together, from the arts and entertainment to heritage and subcultures. Streaming services such as Spotify have changed how music is discovered, since playlists and recommendation algorithms now decide which songs many listeners hear.
4.2 Economic. How people work and exchange goods and services, including business, employment, money and globalisation. M-Pesa, launched in Kenya in 2007, lets people send and receive money by mobile phone without a bank account, and is now used for wages, rent and school fees.
4.3 Environmental. How people interact with the natural and built worlds, including resources, pollution, cities and agriculture. At the Agbogbloshie scrapyard in Accra, Ghana, workers burned discarded electronics to recover copper, exposing themselves and nearby residents to toxic smoke.
4.4 Health. Physical and mental health, and changing understandings of the human body. India's eSanjeevani service connects patients in rural health centres to doctors by video, so that a consultation no longer requires a long journey to a city hospital.
4.5 Human knowledge. How people learn and create new knowledge, in education and in science. DeepMind's AlphaFold predicted the structures of more than 200 million proteins and released them freely, and its developers shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
4.6 Political. How people organise and govern themselves, including elections, activism, governing bodies, conflict and law. In 2018 it emerged that the consultancy Cambridge Analytica had obtained data from up to 87 million Facebook users and used it for political advertising.
4.7 Social. How people are grouped and how they form relationships, including identity, social class, families and friendships. A Stanford University survey found that by 2017 meeting online had become the most common way for heterosexual couples in the United States to meet.
The value of contexts is clearest when a single technology is followed from one area of life to another. Drones, small aircraft flown remotely or by their own software, are a good illustration.
Context | How drones are used | A question the context raises |
|---|---|---|
Health | Since 2016 Zipline has flown blood and medical supplies to clinics in rural Rwanda | Does faster delivery reduce deaths, and who pays for the service? |
Political | Since 2022 both Ukraine and Russia have used large numbers of cheap drones for surveillance and attack | Who is responsible when an armed drone harms civilians? |
Environmental | Farmers use drones to spray crops and map fields, and conservation groups use them to monitor forests and wildlife | Does precise spraying cut chemical use, and who owns the data collected over the land? |
Economic | Amazon began delivering parcels by drone in parts of the United States in 2022 | Will drone delivery replace delivery jobs, and is it affordable outside a few test areas? |
The technology, covered in 3.7 Robots and autonomous technologies, is the same in every row. What changes is the set of people affected, the kind of impact and the questions worth asking. The concepts change with the context too: values and ethics dominate in the political row, while change and power are central in the economic row.
Each subtopic in Topic 4 sets out one context in detail, with its main areas, real-world examples and the impacts and implications of digital systems for the people and communities involved.
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