Ditchley Conference: The Digital Economy – Power and Accountability in the Private Sector

In early December, I participated in a Ditchley Conference on power and accountability in the private sector digital economy as an invitee of the Canadian Ditchley Foundation.

Looking towards the Ditchley Mansion, across the lake from inside the Rotunda.

(If you are not aware of the Ditchley Foundation and the regular conferences that are held at the Ditchley Park country estate outside of Oxford, please check out the Foundation’s website which contains an impressive list of past conferences with a Director’s Summary capturing the unattributed points of the discussion at each event.)

Advertisement

An Umbrella Term for Desktops, Laptops, Tablets and Smartphones

Information and communications technology (ICTs) is a useful term for broadly describing digital technology that allows for manipulating information and communicating with others (both other people and other technologies). It seems to have emerged in its current form in the context of greater proliferation of computer technology around the early 1980s.

ngram of ICTs

While there’s a bit of controversy over the usefulness of the term – and some regional differences (I sense greater affinity for ICTs in European circles than in North America) – the term ICTs is still largely used by academics in digital governance studies as a catch-all that has a sort-of “you know what I mean, right?” flavour to it.