Digital justice for the next billion users

FES in Asia: What is digital justice? 

Payal Arora: Digital justice denotes the ability to gain access and increase participation through new technologies. These allow for new processes and new channels to work towards social justice. At the same time, digital justice is understood as a response to new problems that arise due to technologies, such as forms of alienation and exploitation, anonymity, credit cards scams, revenge porn, and decentralized criminal networks. Take blockchains as an example. Due to its cryptographic nature, it is hard to track money flows and to enforce justice.

Who can protect him- or herself against these new forms of digital injustices? Think of, deepfake videos – neither an educated nor an illiterate person might be able to identify it as fraud. Consequently, it is not a case of haves and have-nots but a matter of the need to constantly re-educate and regulate.

How does the digital divide play into questions of justice?

"This capitalistic deficiency logic engrained in the divide is highly problematic: technology is constantly changing. Consequently, individuals are caught in a seemingly never-ending game of tag."

But even if we are to subscribe to this logic, it is worth adding the layer of the leisure divide to existing layers on access and participation. Leisure opens up the potential to realize our full human potential. The majority of what we do online - regardless of gender or national borders – is leisure- oriented: entertainment, socializing, pornography, gaming.

The irony is that the class divide to the digital divide does not play out in the traditional way, according to which a person from a lower class has less time for leisure in comparison to an individual from the upper class. Instead, what we have been witnessing in the past few years due to disruptions in data and mobile plans is that-the next billion users have come online. Cheap data enables people from low income countries to come online and to use data in a manner we have never seen. In 2019, KPMG found that counterintuitively to what one might expect, the population segment in India that consumed the highest video content online came from the lowest socio-economic group.

Moreover, as you get richer you have less and less time. In the West, people experience burn-outs due to the pressure to being constantly available and the need to work 24/7. The seamlessness of work is cutting down leisure time. Simultaneously, unemployment is very high in the Global South. For example, in Namibia, where we conducted research, 50-60 per cent of young people were unemployed. Being part of WhatsApp groups is what prevented them from slipping into depression. They spent hours on end online, far more than you and I. Only because they have so much down time.

It is no coincidence that in China the average user consumes twice as much data as the average American. This can be related to the shrinking of the public sphere. In privileged societies we exercise our relationships in many more different environments than just online. Yet, in other parts of the world those environments that provide access to public spaces become more and more constricted.