This is Dispatches from the Real World
First we build the tools, then they build us.
― Marshall McLuhan
In early 2018, Doteveryone will release findings from our National Digital Attitudes survey. The research sets out to make sense of how people across the UK feel about living in our (almost suddenly) digital society.
But as well as listening to individual voices, we also want to surface the kinds of unexpected changes new technology is having on services and people that are vital to our society — law centres, police, healthcare, farmers and more — in ways we couldn’t have predicted, but which policy makers and funders should know about.
There’s a ton of attention paid to role of the internet at the top end of town, disrupting big business and reshaping regulation. But there’s still so much we don’t know about how tech is changing the communities and public institutions that serve us.
So every month we’ll be spending time with a different vital service or community in the UK to hear about how things have changed in unexpected ways. Each story will feature dispatches from the place we’ve visited while acknowledging broader themes and good work.
Our list of dispatches is below.