Lars Ilshammar: Digitization is not a quick fix

The impact of new technologies is often overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term. Rarely has this statement been more true than for the ongoing digitalization of society.

Digitization is not a new phenomenon. As far back as the early 1960s, trend spotters began to talk about how digital technology, then still known as electron brains or computers, would soon create a completely new form of society - the knowledge or information society. Unfortunately, the utopian future was a long time coming.

The main reason for this was that the primitive computers of the time only found use in a few narrow sectors where fast mathematical calculations were required. Large parts of society continued to function in a completely analog way.

For a long time, digitalisation was a vertical phenomenon, although more and more sectors of society came under the umbrella of information technology, as it had now come to be known. In everyday life, manual handling and industrial technology still dominated.

But since the 1990s and the great breakthrough of the internet, something important has happened. Digitization has transformed from a vertical to a horizontal force. This means that it is penetrating and transforming a wide range of vital societal functions through deep social rooting. In almost every aspect of our lives, we are now completely dependent on digital technologies and systems. Choosing an analog life is still entirely possible, but it is also choosing an awkward exclusion.

At the same time, digitalization has been de-emphasized and has become something practical and everyday. We find it hard to do without our laptops and smartphones at work, at school and at home. Like all technology, digital is both liberating and addictive at the same time.

Unfortunately, many common notions about the digitalization of society, not least in the world of politics, seem to be based on the idea that we are still discussing a limited, vertically acting force. Thus, digitization should primarily help to patch and fix rather than create something new and different. Paper forms that become web forms or PDF files. Remote meetings with the Employment Service. Computers for all students in school. These are just a few examples.

But it is a serious misconception that digitization can offer a quick fix to various more or less acute and complex social problems. Digitization is not the cure for the shortcomings that have become increasingly apparent in the old industrial society - just like steam power in the 19th century, it creates completely new conditions

It is therefore high time to let go of the idea that everything will be much the same in the digital society, just a bit bigger, better and faster. Digitalization will make many aspects of our lives work fundamentally differently. That must be the starting point. Otherwise, we will get lost in a landscape that has already become history.

Lars Ilshammar, Head of the Department of Physical Collections at the National Library of Sweden and Chair of Digital Utmaning - the think tank on the future of society.