The digital agenda

Communication plays a central role in the future of society. Since digital technology became part of our daily lives, priority has been given to the mission of strongly stimulating accessibility and social participation, ensuring the promotion, development, and consolidation of new technologies as a central instrument for modernisation and improving people's quality of life. Digital technology is an integral part of our lives, but it also has a great opportunity to reinvent itself for the future. Building an information and knowledge society is a complex challenge that cuts across all actors and requires a collaborative commitment from everyone. With digital technology, our society has changed significantly, and the degree of freedom for people to participate has gained a dimension never before possible – information is now available at all times and serves as the basis for new strategic intelligence platforms, driving new collaboration networks and solutions for emerging problems. Despite the enormous progress made with digital technology, empirical signs show a less positive reading of the behaviour of many societies regarding the requirements that innovation and creativity imply. Consolidating a modern knowledge society requires, first and foremost, knowing how to answer the following questions: what path should digital technology take as a central instrument of an active public intervention policy as a transversal matrix for the renewal of our society? How can companies (particularly SMEs) become relevant actors in creating value and ensuring adequate standards of quality and social life in a scenario of increasing economic relocation? What is the effective role of Education as an essential framework for adapting social actors to the new challenges of the knowledge society? Are the knowledge actors we need so much 'educated' or 'trained'? What is the role of R&D as an area capable of making the necessary compromise between the urgency of science and the inevitability of its more than necessary practical applicability for the purposes of inducing a structured culture of innovation? What is the effective meaning of employability and social inclusion policies as instruments for promoting a global objective of social cohesion? What should be done for all those who, due to unemployment, feel increasingly marginalised by the system? The aim is to create the conditions for the 'networked' qualification of the different actors who drive a new society, providing a true agenda of modernity, participatory and committed to the new paradigm of competitiveness, essential for creating a national opportunity in the global economy. Knowledge thus gains a central status in changing the society's development paradigm, materialised in the commitment between social cohesion and competitiveness. In these uncertain and complex times, digital technology must reinvent itself. This is the time for information to assume itself once and for all as the basis of a new strategic intelligence that mobilises society for a new collective contract of trust, in which individual autonomy is assumed as the basis of a new difference. The future of digital technology is also very much the future of our society.