What is digital society? practice questions.

A district council evaluates its new online appointment booking service by showing a short satisfaction survey on the confirmation screen that appears once a booking has been completed. Ninety-six per cent of respondents rate the service good or very good, and the council reports that residents are satisfied with it. Which flaw in this reasoning should be identified first?

• Only residents who completed a booking could answer, so those who gave up never appear
• The council should have published the number of respondents alongside the percentage figure
• Satisfaction is a judgement and therefore cannot be recorded on a rating scale at all
• The survey appeared immediately after use, so respondents had not yet attended the appointment

Answer: Only residents who completed a booking could answer, so those who gave up never appear

The sampling frame contains only successful users, so residents who abandoned the form, or never attempted it, are structurally invisible. A high score drawn from the survivors of a process says nothing about the population the council claims to describe.

A council replaced its telephone line for housing repairs with an online form in 2023. A researcher wants to identify an implication of the change for tenants rather than an impact of it. Which single finding would do that?

• Reports of broken heating rose by a fifth in the first year the form ran
• The tenants' association rewrote its advice service to help members complete the form
• Eight thousand tenants submitted a repair report through the form during 2024
• The repairs telephone line was switched off on the day the form went live

Answer: The tenants' association rewrote its advice service to help members complete the form

An impact is the effect that occurred; an implication is what follows from that effect for an affected group. Changed reporting volumes are impacts, while a tenants' body reorganising its own work in response is an implication.

A city installs free wi-fi in its public libraries so that residents without a home connection can reach council services online. Which observation would show most directly that the measure has not achieved that stated aim?

• The library network carries more traffic each month than the council forecast
• Some residents use the library network for entertainment as well as for council business
• Residents without a home connection complete council transactions no more often than before
• The monthly running cost of the network is higher than the original budget allowed

Answer: Residents without a home connection complete council transactions no more often than before

An intervention is judged against the outcome it was introduced to change, not against its own usage figures. Traffic, cost and incidental uses show that the measure is running, not that the excluded group has been reached.

M-Pesa, launched by Safaricom in Kenya in 2007, was used by a large share of adults within a few years, while comparable text-message payment services introduced in several high-income countries at the same time stayed marginal. Which contextual condition best explains the difference?

• Mobile telephone coverage in Kenya reached further into rural areas than in the other countries
• Handsets sold in Kenya could send text messages, while handsets sold elsewhere could not
• No regulator in the high-income countries was able to license a payment service
• Few adults in Kenya already held a bank account, so the service met an unserved need

Answer: Few adults in Kenya already held a bank account, so the service met an unserved need

The same technology meets a different existing arrangement in each place, and where banking was already near-universal the service duplicated something people had. This is why the course examines contexts instead of assuming a technology carries one fixed effect.

A public library replaces its printed catalogue with a search interface that ranks results by how often each book has been borrowed, so rarely borrowed works almost never appear on the first screen. Which key concept does this most directly raise, and why not a neighbouring one?

• Power, because the ranking rule decides which works readers ever see
• Change, because the catalogue moved from printed cards to a screen
• Space, because readers now search from home instead of the building
• Systems, because the catalogue software has to be maintained and updated

Answer: Power, because the ranking rule decides which works readers ever see

Power in this course is about who decides and who is decided for, and here a ranking rule allocates visibility. Change and space are present too, but they describe the move to a screen rather than the effect the rule has on readers.

Anyone who affects a digital system, or is affected by it, including people who never use it, belongs to a ___ group. (one word)

Answer: stakeholder

The term deliberately covers non-users, because most consequences of a deployment land on people outside the user base, such as employees, neighbours and applicants. Writing 'users' where the mark scheme expects this term is the most frequent loss of an easy mark.