What is ‘digital literacy’?

Digital Epicycles

Given the problems of pinning down just one Digital Literacy or conceptualising practices in terms of ‘Digital Flow’ it is tempting to question the whole enterprise. However, there does seem to be something out there worth talking about, something that transcends language barriers and, despite Prensky’s assertions to the contrary, generations of learners.

Perhaps one of the difficulties is that researchers focus too much upon the ‘literacy’ part of ‘digital literacy’: they stress the part they believe to be problematic and assume that everyone knows what is meant by ‘digital’. However, part of the problem may be that the adjective, commonly considered to be ‘digital’ is actually the verb, with adjective (literacy) and verb (digital) the wrong way around. Would conceptions of ‘literacy digital’ be any different from ‘digital literacy’?

First of all, we need to get to grips with what is meant by the word ‘digital’. At its most fundamental level, ‘digital’ is defined in opposition to ‘analogue’ with the former being made up of binary distinctions and numbers in a way the latter is not. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of the word ‘digital’ is from the use of fingers (Latin: digitālis) and has to do with separate numerical values. However, it would seem counter-intuitive to consider a suitable definition of ‘digital’ as merely consisting of bits and bytes and binary states. Instead, much as a ‘text’ can be understood as more than simply a collection of printed words, ‘digital’ can be understood in a more metaphorical way. If ‘digital’ denotes bits and bytes, what does it connote?

Interestingly, as with ‘literacy’, ‘digital’ involves an aspect of status. The digital world is often compared in unfavourable terms in the mainstream media with the ‘real’ world. Increasingly, the ‘digital’ is synonymous with ‘online’ much as the ‘internet’ and the ‘World Wide Web’ is an elision that usually goes unquestioned, despite meaning separate things. This difference in status leads to pejorative and dismissive considerations of Facebook ‘friends’ and other types of online interactions which, it is argued (Daily Mail, 2011) are not as ‘real’ as those kinds carried out face-to-face. Alternative ‘realities’ such as Second Life, and to some extent Minecraft and World of Warcraft, are seen as somehow less legitimate places for interaction than the street, the classroom or the coffee shop.

Before mass-adoption of internet connections, ‘digital’ would apply to stand-alone computers with, for example, floppy disks containing a backup of a ‘real’ document that had been produced: the analogue world took precedence. Today, however, the digital version is seen as the ‘real’ taking precedence over any particular physical manifestation; documents, for example, are understood to be primarily digital with occasional printed iterations. If we ask the question of what has changed over the last 20 years, the answer is that the ease and speed of digital communications over networks (and networks of networks) has increased exponentially. Documents and other kinds of files can reside in multiple locations and it can often be as easy to get in touch with someone in a distant country and time zone than someone in an adjacent classroom or office.

This is not merely a change in speed. The ability to work differently leads, naturally, to different social and work practices. Thus, we have distributed teams and increases in home working amongst those whom are considered ‘knowledge workers’ (37 Signals, 2010). The ‘digital’ is no longer a different realm that one enters into from time-to-time, but fully integrated in a blended, ‘augmented’ way through the proliferation of personal devices such as smartphones, MP3 players and tablet computers.

Conceiving of ‘literacy digital’ must, to a great extent, involve some kind of understanding of the affordances ‘digital’ provides. The difference is not encapsulated merely in connecting to people one has never met face-to-face for a common purpose as, after all, social movements with their pamphlets and public meetings have been a feature of societies for hundreds of years. Nor is it the case that real world effects such as the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 (Mason, 2011) are the result of face-to-face practices translated to, and accelerated by, a digital world. The difference can be explained with reference to the ways in which imitation and inspiration work in the analogue and digital worlds. In the analogue world, these are subject to stringent copyright laws; slight variations upon a theme may be known collectively as ‘fashions’ but copying is liable to end in a lawsuit. In the digital world, meanwhile, with much different copyright and remix cultures, memes become much more nuanced versions of mere ‘fashions’ and lawsuits are less likely.

Examples of well-known memes include LOLcats, ‘all your base belong to us’ and the phenomenon of ‘Rickrolling’. These all involve some form of specific cultural awareness, in-jokes and technical expertise. Taking just one of these examples, Rickrolling, we can see that it is a classic bait-and-switch manouvere in which a seemingly-relevant link takes the unsuspecting person clicking upon it to the video of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. This video was chosen because of the seriousness and earnestness of the lyrics and facial expressions coupled with bad dancing. The tension and evident ‘uncool’ nature of the 1980s era video is humorous. Even a meme that depends heavily on a particular form of media (in this case, video) can evolve, with a spoof Wikileaks version making the rounds in late 2010 (Huffington Post, 2010) being a ‘Rickroll’ but entirely text-based. This official-looking document, which copied the format of a ‘leaked’ cable becoming increasingly well-known because of the furore surrounding the Wikileaks website at that time, simply featured the lyrics from ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. Amusing and largely innocuous, such practices highlight the importance of effective digital practices including the awareness of sources of information.

There are many ways to try to get at ‘literacy digital’. Howard Rheingold, for instance, talks of a ‘network literacy’ being essential to life in the 21^st century. He believes that ‘humans appropriate communication media to self-organise collective action on their own behalf’ (Rheingold, 2009a), something that would help explain the ‘Arab Spring’ mentioned above, and which was organised primarily through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Becoming ‘network literate’ is important, argues Rheingold, as it has to do with the locus of control: what you know about networks affects the freedom, wealth and participation both you and your children may enjoy. ‘Literacy digital’ for Rheingold is therefore allied to the protocols and methods for connecting networks together to create added value. Such a ‘literacy of the digital’ is a key building block in Rheingold’s choice of umbrella term: ‘Participatory Media Literacy’ (Rheingold, 2009b).

Perhaps, as the digital world and the physical world become increasingly blended, the need to append the word ‘literacy’ to what are, in many cases, examples of awareness will diminish. Focusing on the ‘digital’ aspect of digital literacies brings out the ways in which traditional notions of literacy are predicated upon embodiment as much as ideas and competencies. Digital copies are (usually) instantaneous, perfect copies of the original file which, amongst other things, changes the (perceived) value of the result of someone’s work. The traditional deficit model (if I have a unique thing, then you do not) does not apply in a digital, networked world. Literacy, argue thinkers such as Rheingold, must at least take account of this difference.

In a way, then, digital literacy is a metaphorical term, a bridging concept that helps individuals move from one realm to another. In alternative versions of the distribution we saw earlier in this chapter there is often a gap in the curve between the ‘Early adopters’ and the ‘Early majority’. In order for concepts and technologies to bridge this gap the value of that concept or technology has to be made explicit to a greater number of people. It could be argued that digital literacy has served, and continues to serve, as that bridging term between the early adopters and the majority, moving as a concept from the Creative ambiguity part of the spectrum I introduced in Chapter 5 towards a more Productive ambiguity. A concept that may be worth exploring for researchers is the idea of digital workflows and to what extent good design plays a part in minimising the functional digital literacy skills required by individuals. The launch of the Apple iPad in 2010 is a good example of this as designers specifically took into account previous frustrations (with devices that had effectively evolved from typewriters) in forming something radically different. Changing towards a more human-centred design of technology potentially ameliorates some of the problems and learning curve associated with digital literacies.

Summing up

Despite the multiplicity of ways that digital literacy is used in practice, for any kind of academic rigour to be maintained the four requirements of digital literacy outlined in Chapter 3 still need to be met. It would appear that proponents of digital skills must jettison any claims to ‘literacy’ or, they must develop some form of framework of new and digital literacies. This framework must be resilient enough to include both those literacies no longer culturally or technologically relevant, as well as accommodating those that may be developed in future.

It would appear to be very difficult, if not impossible, to define a single new literacy that would do the same job as a matrix of digital literacies. If such a definition was to avoid being an umbrella term it would need to be so lengthy as to be unwieldy and unhelpful in practice. A semi-fluid, community-accepted matrix of literacies could be flexible enough to be adaptable to various current contexts as well as having the ability to be updated as necessary in future. In Chapter 9 I attempt to introduce a matrix of the core elements of digital literacy to serve as a flexible framework able to be easily contextualised and adapted to specific situations. To a great extent, then, the matrix I present in Chapter 9 is influenced by the new literacies work of Martin, the media work of McLuhan, and the philosophical work of Quine and Rorty.

Chapter 9: A matrix of elements

‘For never shall this be forcibly maintained, that things that are not are, but you must hold back your thought from this way of enquiry, not let habit, born of much experience, force you down this way, by making you use an aimless eye or an ear and a tongue full of meaningless sound: judge by reason the strife-encompassed refutation spoken by me.’

(Parmenides)
Upon analysing many different definitions of Digital Literacy and New Literacies in the previous chapters I found that either they do not have the necessary explanatory power, or they become stuck in a potentially-endless cycle of umbrella terms and micro literacies. After critiquing other researchers’ contributions to the digital literacy arena I intend in this penultimate chapter to contribute something positive of my own to the literature so that, in turn, educational practice can be improved. Whilst my research and analysis has led me to dismiss the idea of a single, overarching literacy, I argue in this chapter that something along the lines of the matrix of literacies implied by Martin (2008) may be sustainable. I will expand up on the 8C’s of digital literacies that I abstracted from the research literature in Chapter 4, making the case that these form an essential ‘core’ of elements in a matrix of overlapping literacies.⁵³ This should be considered with reference to both Quine’s ‘web of beliefs’ (Chapter 6) and McLuhan’s tetrads (Chapter 8): the former in the sense that some elements are more ‘core’ than others in certain contexts, and the latter in the sense that the process of contextualizing digital literacies is a tetradic process of enhancing, reversing, retrieving and obsolescing. As a result, the second half of this chapter will be more lightly referenced than the rest of this thesis as it constitutes an original synthesis and abstraction predicated upon the work in previous chapters.

Download 7.07 Mb.

Share with your friends: