Interrogating digital technology: A critical analysis of the Council of Europe’s digital citizenship education discourse

The pervasiveness of the ‘digital imperative’ has heightened the importance of digital citizenship education, with the Council of Europe being a significant proponent. Using a Foucauldian-inspired critical discourse studies analytical approach, this study analyses selected Council of Europe publications addressed to parents, trainers and teachers. Neither the digital nor digital technology is explicitly defined in any of them, and this absence is itself productive. Left undefined, the digital and digital technology acquire determinate form through recurrent grammatical, figurative and classificatory operations, appearing inevitable and self-evident while users are positioned as those who must adapt. We describe this configuration as the productive silence surrounding the digital. The paper further shows that the political and economic dimensions of digital technology are not absent from this discourse. When they come into view, they are described in some detail, yet their significance is promptly redirected into the register of individual competence and conduct, a discursive manoeuvre we describe as concession and recuperation. The broader implication is that digital citizenship education forms subjects within socio-technical arrangements whose political and economic constitution is not made available for critical interrogation and contestation.