The Next Digital Decade: Post Pandemic Future(s)

CONTEXT

In 2021, Digital Asia Hub (DAH) and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) Political Dialogue Asia Singapore launched a 2-part series, The Next Digital Decade: Case Studies from Asia. Volume 1, titled ‘Traces and Divides’, traces the impact of the Internet on society, politics, and life in Asia, while identifying the many divides that persist. Volume 2, titled 'spaces and futures', examines the challenges of responding to the challenges of digital transformation with perspectives from Asia to highlight their relevance for global audiences.

To mark the launch of the volumes, DAH and KAS invited the authors to participate in an in-person workshop in Singapore taking place 17-19 May 2022. The intention was to bring together a group of researchers and academics from across the region and beyond to participate in a workshop to
highlight their collective experience, expertise, and diversity.

This workshop was the first international in-person event organised by DAH and KAS, after more than two years of Zoom-based collaboration. Together, we took stock of the many technological, societal, economic, and political changes in the past decade, to imagine and speculate on the possible futures of a world more centered on people and the planet.

APPROACH

Participants were tasked with sharing ideas from their research and experience which included ‘values, principles, ideas, laws, and business models’ from their own countries or across the wider region that were either:

• new, emerging or nascent; for example, blockchain based tracking in supply chains, or
• at risk of being eliminated or becoming less relevant; for example, decreasing trust in large social institutions.

Through a combination of facilitated group exercises, workshop participants then identified the missing tools, platforms or tactics that might enable the conditions for these trends to come into existence or be built. In the final part of the workshop, participants built on their insights and discussions to formulate a pitch in the form of a civil society focused “Dolphin Tank”, a play on the popular “Shark Tank”, for a new idea, concept or project presented to a panel of members.

Key highlights

The workshop identified a total of 102 trends. These have been lightly edited for brevity.

Trust: This was considered to be the most featured at-risk trend. This can be interpreted as a loss of public trust in key institutions (public and private).

Public: There was a convergence around digital spaces for the public e.g. “Community and culture centered businesses”, “public ownership of platforms” and “non-commercial public spaces”. This theme was later fleshed out into a project pitch during Dolphin Tank.

Semantics: While there were similar ideas expressed about emergent technologies such as a ‘generative’ and ‘open’ internet, there is a lack of a shared vocabulary for future and emergent trends.

Specificity: Emerging trends are much more specific in terms of behaviours, technologies, practices vis e.g. ‘ideals or principles’ like “trust”

Values: Some emergent / at risk trends were the same. For example privacy or open Internet but seen from two different lenses,

Global/Local: Although case studies and perspectives were focused on the Asia region, there was a clear global and international theme to the trends identified in the workshop –an observation that underscores the global interconnectedness of these issues.