By Charalambos Tsekeris and Theodora Papaefthimiou
This short article maintains that, in times of structural and persistent crisis, Europe needs to tackle the multiple challenges and existential fears by cultivating a strong and dynamical digital skills ecosystem, based on collective values and the fundamental liberal principles of co-creation, co-evolution, and collective intelligence (over against the obsolete principles of optimisation and top-down administration and control). This will arguably result in boosting innovation and, therefore, adaptiveness, as well as in translating technological progress into economic growth, and risks into opportunities for all citizens.
On 19 April 2016, the European Commission, under the leadership of Commissioner Oettinger, launched an ambitious strategy on digitising European industry. Mariya Gabriel, as current Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, is now responsible for its systematic implementation. This pertains to the first industry-related initiative of the Digital Single Market package, aimed to accelerate responsible and sustainable innovation, to boost productivity and economic growth, to fight social inequality, and to improve EU citizens’ living standards and job opportunities.
Nowadays, the spread of digital technology and Industry 4.0 (representing the Fourth Industrial Revolution) is rapidly changing the structure, nature, character and dynamics of communication, consumption, production, employment and learning within the European Union and worldwide, leading to novel types of jobs and novel types of education (i.e. Education 4.0). But it is also leading to the vital and urgent need for every European citizen to have at least basic and transversal digital literacy skillsin order to live, share, communicate, work, learn and actively participate in the contemporary speedy, complex, hyper-connected and increasingly knowledge-based society.
Digital literacy skills include information literacy skills, media literacy skills, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) literacy skills. Interestingly, information, media, and technology skills constitute a strong and integral part of the new framework for the twenty-first-century learning paradigm, according to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21). In general, this learning paradigm helps us energetically navigate our future and decisively dispel “old”, “received” or “traditional” dichotomies, like those pertaining to the content vs. skills debate. Continue reading
In January 2018, I joined a team of researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE) who were starting to work on a project about the local-level impact of Britain’s departure from the European Union in five British local authorities. We set ourselves a double challenge: firstly, we wanted to understand why people voted the way they did in those five areas in the 2016 EU referendum, in light of the local context and the issues that were considered politically significant locally. Secondly, we wanted to do a little experiment: If we produced a report about the impacts of Brexit that was locally relevant, combining the results of existing quantitative studies with the evidence collected through our own field work in each local authority, would it be possible to bring Leavers and Remainers together in one room and spark a forward-looking, evidence-based discussion about Brexit within each local community?
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Read from the other side, the birth of Conte’s government signals that liberal Euro-Atlantic networks have lost political control of Italy. This is a serious development, and it follows the loss of Central-Eastern Europe to nationalist parties, the right-wing turn in Austria, Brexit, and above all Donald Trump’s seizure of the White House. It adds to a growing movement which rejects what Europe (and the Western world more in general) has become in the decades following the end of the Cold War, as well as its ideological underpinnings. These can be listed as cosmopolitanism, pluralism, multiculturalism, but they are often also interpreted as mass immigration, uncontrolled economic globalisation, suppression of local and national identities, extreme individualism, cultural uprooting, Islamisation, “gender ideology”. That movement, variously called “nationalist”, “populist”, “right-wing”, “anti-establishment”, “sovereignist”, which in reality contains an astonishing variety of positions, is undoubtedly riding an historical tide similar to the one which led to the demise of the Soviet bloc. It is radically transforming the landscape of Western politics, and it has already caused irreversible changes.
