Communication’s Jonathan Ong Part of New $4.5M Project Ensuring Technologies are Socially Beneficial

Jonathan Corpus Ong, communication, is set to serve as co-investigator for the Digital Good Network (DGN), a new $4.5 million research network that will explore how digital technologies can be used in ways that benefit people, society and the economy.

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Hosted by the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, the DGN will be led by a consortium of universities and cross-sector stakeholders including UMass Amherst, the BBC and Birmingham Museums [U.K.] Trust.

Funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the DGN will bring researchers together across disciplines and sectors to generate new insights into the ‘digital good’, and provide digital technology developers, companies and policymakers with the know-how to ensure technologies contribute to the public good.

The DGN will focus on three societal challenges that are crucial to envisioning good relationships with, and through, digital technologies:

• Equity: Because digital relationships take place in conditions of structural inequity
• Sustainability:  Because planetary challenges like climate change demand that our digital relationships are sustainable
• Resilience:  Because wellbeing, wellness and coping strategies in the face of pandemics, political conflicts, natural disasters, digital misinformation, online hate are important to realize the digital good

To help ensure that digital technologies have good societal outcomes, the DGN will produce a “Digital Good Index” to evaluate digital innovations and ensure good societal outcomes. Rather than simply reducing  the ‘digital good’ to a simplistic checklist, the index will instead account for how, when, where and for whom digital relationships might be considered good.

Ong will be working with a postdoctoral fellow on an original research project exploring misinformation in digital wellness spaces. He will be leading coordination of the internationalization initiatives of the network and identify new researchers and partner institutions to implement policy and community interventions.

“The Digital Good Network opens up huge possibilities for international and intersectoral collaboration,” Ong says. “By establishing new mentoring opportunities and creative translations of academic research, we hope to reimagine digital spaces such that they may center the public good and promote cooperation, creativity and solidarity.”

“Because technologies can be harmful, it is understandable that to date, there has been more attention to digital harms than to the digital good,” says Helen Kennedy, professor of digital society at the University of Sheffield and DGN director. “But to ensure that digital technologies have good outcomes for people and societies, we need to turn our attention to what the digital good should look like and how it can be achieved.”

More information about the Digital Good Network can be found at www.digitalgood.net.