Digi society

DIGI SOCIETY

Digital change

I was born in the 1980s and was a child of the recession in the 1990s. My first memories of computers are related to when my older brother got a gaming machine, the Amiga, with which first he and later I have played thousands of hours of different computer games in the early 1990s. After the mid-1990s, some neighbors in the small village started to have car phones, which were huge and expensive. We never had a car phone at home, but when mobile phones came to Finland, we also bought a mobile phone. The reason for buying a mobile phone was that my father worked as a taxi driver, and it was easier to reach him in traffic with the help of a mobile phone. I also remember when the first computers came to our school around the same time that we bought a mobile phone. The school’s computers also had the Internet, which felt really amazing! Our teacher was enthusiastic about digital issues and taught us how to use wordpad and email. Sometimes you could play minesweeper or tetris, for example, on school computers.

I got my first mobile phone in middle school and my first real computer, not just a gaming machine, when I started in high school. My elderly parents never learned how to use a computer, and I still help my mother with things that require digital skills. When I was in high school, most of the assignments and tests were still done on paper, but since I was into writing on a computer, I asked permission to write the assignments on the computer, and I succeeded.

I started studying nursing in January 2006, and at that time some of the assignments were done on paper, some on a computer. At the end of my nursing studies, I was already working a lot in a hospital, and those times in 2008-2009 were a time of strong digital transition in the hospital world. Personally, I have not made very many entries in paper patient information systems, but at that point, both health centres and the university hospital began to systematically use electronic health records everywhere.

I worked as a nurse in a hospital for a long time, but for the past three years I have worked as a project coordinator in the project. The work started in autumn 2020, when people were living strongly remotely and working remotely due to the coronavirus. At that time, the leap into the digital world was tremendously fast and large. The work was done remotely, we use teams, through which I do more than 90 percent of all my work. Remote work and the development of digitalization at work have made a huge amount of things possible. We are able to hold meetings in real time all over Finland, we are able to maintain huge networks that can gather in teams very quickly if necessary. We are able to network in a way that would be completely impossible without digitalization. Digitalization also generates efficiency and savings, as time is not wasted on trips and transfers. On the other hand, I think that digitalization has increased loneliness a lot. When working remotely, you don’t meet other people in the same way as you do at the office, you don’t go for coffee, you don’t talk about ordinary everyday things, when you focus effectively only on work. In addition, remote meetings may not be as present or able to interpret another person’s facial expressions and gestures as naturally as in in-person meetings.

In the future, we should find ways to make the best use of digitalization and live encounters in all work. People need people, but digitalisation can be utilised in national and international cooperation to enable people to meet.

Digital society risks and data protection reform

In my opinion, one major risk factor in the digital society is issues related to data protection and data security. As stated in the videos of the course material, digitalization is a good servant, but a bad master. As fire as a tool, digitalization should also be harnessed for the right use, and not in such a way that we will soon not be in control of the information and risks that developing digitalization produces. When all information is open, information can be collected about us that we cannot control. Often, for example, when we navigate the Internet, we “accept cookies” without knowing what it really means. I have had to familiarise myself with the data protection reform, i.e. GDPR, especially in my work as a project coordinator, when we collect different kinds of information from other employees and customers. We have had to work with the organisation’s lawyers to find out what kind of data can be collected without asking for permission, and how all data collected must be accompanied by information about where the data is collected and what it is used for. This is important for all of us, both in civilian life and at work. A positive aspect of data collection legislation is that it takes into account informing people about what data, how it is collected about them and what the data is used for. The negative thing about the GDPR is that although its purpose is to increase understanding of data collection, not all people necessarily understand what their data is used for. The General Data Protection Regulation also does not remove the fact that even if a person does not want their data to be disclosed, nowadays so many things are based on the disclosure of data that it may be mandatory to disclose data in any case.

Chat GPT

I asked Chat GPT questions related to my field of work:

1. What is evidence-based?

2. What is effectiveness?

3. What are psychosocial methods?

Chat GPT gave a general answer to the questions, which did not yet directly describe the detailed issues related to my work context. If those questions were asked by a person who doesn’t have any basic knowledge or skills related to the subject, the AI’s answer wouldn’t give a very descriptive answer or increase the person’s knowledge except on a very general level. Artificial intelligence did not directly answer the questions incorrectly, but neither did it very comprehensively. Personally, I even see AI as a threat, because I think people should read more and find out more about things themselves and in dialogue with other people. In addition, humans do not yet sufficiently know what artificial intelligence is developing and capable of, and it may pose a threat to humanity as a whole. I think there is a lot of good in AI when it generates information quickly, but also a lot of contradiction. Whether people will encounter each other less and less in the future, I am concerned about that. The production of misinformation is also a major concern of mine. Young people in particular may find it difficult to distinguish what is AI-generated information, even invented information.

Self-assessment

Stopping at the digital world has been interesting. The assignment has made me think back to my own childhood when computers and mobile phones were the latest in Finland. The spread of computer use has evolved throughout my school and career, and the development has been very fast. It may be that even this kind of independent text production will be outdated in a few decades’ time, who knows. However, I think that reading, writing, independent thinking and interacting with people are skills that should never disappear, otherwise we will no longer be human. I am particularly concerned about artificial intelligence.

I commented on these blogs:

DIGI SOCIETY | Kirsi`s blog (savonia.fi)

Digitalisation in social services – Jennika Talventuoma (savonia.fi)