Connecting Cross-sector Community Voices: Data, Disadvantage, and Postdigital Inclusion

The often discussed ‘digital divide’ (Van Dijk 2020) between those who can benefit from the digital age, and those who cannot, is generally perceived as an issue of access to infrastructure and digital devices. When followed by an emphasis on digital skills training for those who have been disadvantaged, exactly how individuals encounter, create, or respond to data, or indeed how they resist the collection of data about themselves, is rarely mentioned. For example, a recent UK House of Lords report, ‘Beyond Digital: Planning for a Hybrid World’ (Marston et al. 2021), examines the complex implications of the Covid-19 pandemic on economic and social wellbeing. Whilst human digital interactions are acknowledged in the report as diverse, hybrid, or postdigital in nature, data tends to be mentioned in relation to research and statistical variation of access to services, or with regard to cyberattacks, or general loss of data. Yet data takes many different forms in postdigital society, and all of these are relevant, in matters of digital inequality and disadvantage.