From Skilled Users to Critical Citizens? : Imagining and Future-Making as Part of Digital Citizenship

The profound digitalization of everyday environments and the deep social, political, and economic implications of this development mean there is an urgent need for not just advancing but rethinking digital citizenship, as well as reconsidering different actors’ roles within this new order. In many societies, digital literacy already determines individuals’ possibilities to effectively function as a part of society: everyday life actions such as accessing health services and using public transport are dependent on digital literacy. However, this is just one level of the ongoing transformation. More broadly, digital technology is deeply woven into everyday practices, social interactions, cultural experiences, economic transactions, and political decision-making (Manovich 2013; Williamson 2014). This results in that digital literacy, understood mainly as a set of adequate skills that help in navigating digitalized everyday environments, needs to be accompanied by notions of broader critical awareness of technologies’ role in society. In this chapter, we explore one facet of this critical awareness: how the notion of digital citizenship could be complemented and expanded to include an ability to imagine alternative future trajectories.