So what?

Well, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, we are all living at a time of unprecedented social, economic and environmental change. Climate change, an aging population, the economic crisis and cultural and religious tensions are acting to destabilise and reshape our world in ways we cannot predict or control.

The challenges to our communities, our public services, our businesses, ourselves, could be overwhelming. In the UK, the homogenous society once served by the BBC News and the NHS has grown into a complex, multicultural, multilingual network of overlapping communities served by a thousand news and entertainment sources, but still cared for by the same centralised NHS. Top-down hierarchies are becoming inefficient and ineffective, failing to meet the increasingly complex and nuanced demands of modern society. Even if we could provide everything our society needs centrally, we would still struggle to pay for it. And meanwhile, the global climate crisis is turning us more than ever into one planet with shared responsibilities to each other. Something has to give.

Technology isn’t a panacea, but it can make our existing activities cheaper and more accessible, and it can also allow us to do new things that were not previously possible. Modern communications technologies are doing both, giving us new tools and new platforms to develop ideas, deliver services, organise activities, circulate information, engage people, establish accountability, solve problems and share best practice. Already they have the potential to radically alter how the state, the third sector and our local communities serve the well-being of society. 

Here are a few examples of how better communication can help improve civil society:

• Personalisation: enabling individuals to design public services and do things for themselves
• Efficiency: making the effort and resources we spend go further and do more
• Inclusion: lowering and circumnavigating the barriers to information, and participation
• Transparency: making information and decision-making processes open and trustworthy 

And the potential uses of these technologies are only just beginning to be explored.