What is digital literacy?
“The capacity to make meaning with digital tools.” Bonnie Stewart
Digital literacy is concerned with the process of handling data rather than accumulating data. In this tutorial, you’ll be introduced to a couple of key skills and concepts that will help you navigate online and control your digital identity.
Explore
Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, have created a Web Literacy Map that highlights key skills and activities associated with digital literacy in the 21st century. For now, we can consider digital literacy and web literacy to be synonymous. The map will allow you to explore each of the different domains and skills. Take a few minutes to visit the site and consider their definition of digital/web literacy.
Listen
Bonni Stachowiak from the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast interviewed Bryan Alexander on the topic of digital literacies and how the idea has changed over the last decade. While you listen, think about how the ideas that Bonni and Bryan talk about apply to your experience as a citizen in a digital world, then talk about digital literacy with someone.
Digital Literacy – Then and Now
One advantage of using podcasts as a format on the web is that users can listen to a podcast while they are doing something else that doesn’t require significant cognitive effort, like driving, doing the dishes, or exercising. This allows people to capture time that would otherwise be taken from learning if the medium was text.
Why is digital literacy important?
In December 2013, the Senior Director for Corporate Communications at the internet company IAC was fired from her job. The reason that she was fired was that there was a massive global response to something that she did. She sent a tweet.
Justine was traveling from New York to Cape Town, South Africa to visit family for the holidays and, on a layover at Heathrow, she tweeted to her 170 Twitter followers:
Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!
Then she wandered around Heathrow for a half-hour and, as she boarded her flight, turned off her phone.
While she slept on the 11-hour flight over Africa, a writer named Sam Biddle found her tweet and retweeted it to his own followers. All 15,000 of them. Before long, parts of the internet were in a frenzy of rage and then, glee. The top trending hashtag on Twitter worldwide was ‘#HasJustineLandedYet’. Not only were people angry at the pious privilege and racism of Justine’s tweet, but they were giddy at the thought of what was going to happen when she turned her phone back on.
The fallout from sending that one tweet was devastating for Justine. You can read more about Justine’s (and others’) story here.
If the career and personal life of a communications professional like Justine can be destroyed by a single tweet, then surely we need to exercise care and caution when engaging on the web. One lesson that we all need to consider is that activities on the internet are not made better by them being on the internet. Adding technology to an environment, whether it is a social environment or a learning environment, does not necessarily make that environment better. Generally, adding technology, especially technologies that encourage network effects, acts as an amplifier. That means that some good things can be spread more widely, increasing the positive effects of activities, but it also means that bad things can also be spread more widely and quickly.
Had Justine understood how much her tweet could be amplified by the way that the web (and Twitter) works, she might have made a very different decision and not sent that tweet. Sam Biddle did understand the power of the web to amplify messages, and he consciously used that knowing that Justine would be victimized. A digitally literate person ought to make wise and strategic decisions about what they share on the web.
Consider
Consider the questions below. To share your thoughts and practice blogging, you may also want to create a new post on your blog asnwering the questions. Use the categories ‘TWU Online’ and ‘Digital Literacy’.
- Have you ever witnessed or experienced negative fallout for something you or someone else said online?
- Have you ever witnessed or experienced the public shaming a person or organizations for something that they said online?
- What strategies will you employ to ensure that you don’t become a participant or victim of the Internet Rage Machine?