You may have noticed that around the cybersafety scene the language is changing. The old terms like e-safety and digital safety are out – the new buzz phrase is ”digital citizenship”. Now – I’ve been around marketing for a while, and I can spot a re-branding exercise if ever I saw one.

Lets face it – lots of Cybersafety organisations were due a rebrand. They’d been shouting about the virtual sky falling for a while – and surprise, it hadn’t. Marketers know that the best thing to do with a product you’ve got that nobody wants is to dress it up as another product.  

So along comes Digital Citizenship. It certainly sounds like an improved version of digital safety. It sounds so much more complete. More complex. More intelligent. It has a certain je ne sais quoi if you know what I mean.

So be weary, sometimes “Digital Citizenship” is just a label applied to existing cybersafety approaches and programmes.  

But not always. Cybersafety was based on this premise “Some people (experts) have knowledge. If they (the experts) can find a way to impart this knowledge to the non-experts, the non-experts will be able to keep themselves safe”. Cybersafety organisations spent a lot of time analysing why education programmes weren’t working. Did we chose the wrong media? Is our message “down with the youth” enough? Did we chose the right colour palette?

After a while, some people started wondering if we were even on the right track? Digital society has all the complexity of the other society (he says as if you can talk about them as two separate societies). If you venture out of the house to the shopping mall, go to work, or go to the beach – you will apply and adapt general safety concepts many times a day to stay safe. You don’t follow many hard and fast rules. You make decisions when safety rules conflict or overlap. You chose to take risk for the rewards it might bring.

Staying safe in the digital society is the same.

Digital Citizens will adapt their existing knowledge to face new challenges. Digital Citizens make their own decisions on how much risk they will expose themselves to. Digital Citizens contribute to the safety of their fellow citizens.

So that is the shift in a nutshell. We don’t tell people how to protect themselves – we prepare people to protect themselves. It’s a subtle change, and yet – it’s a massive shift.