Digital Literacy

In 1997, Paul Gilster published his seminal work, Digital Literacy. Since the publication of that work, both the definition and significance of digital literacy has been debated in scholarly and academic research.

     Baynham and Prinsloo introduce the concept of literacy, and provide an overview of the three generations of literacy studies. Digital literacy draws from earlier work on text-based literacy.

In the 1980s, an interdisciplinary group of academics emerged that challenged previous notions of literacy. This theoretical framework was known as New Literacy Studies (NLS) (Street, 1984; Gee, 2000, Baynham & Prinsloo, 2009).  This first generation of literacy theorists looked at literacy not simply as the ability to read and write, but as culturally embedded practices. As members of a society, we do not read or write in a vacuum. Texts are interpreted through our sociocultural understanding –“a situated, communicative competence embedded in acquired, “deep” cultural knowledge and learnt models of using situated language in specific ways”. (Heath, 1983, as cited in Baynham & Prinsloo).

Heath (1983) and Street (1984) examined the socially constructed language and literacy practices of specific cultural groups, and shifted the focus of literacy studies from the classroom to the culturally embedded contexts of these practices. NLS saw literacy not simply as the acquisition of skills but as social practice (Street, 1985). “Literacy practices are aspects not only of “culture” but also of power structures” involving “fundamental aspects of epistemology, power, and politics” (Street, 1993). This critical view of literacy is important to consider when looking at literacy as socially constructed, and can be seen as an issue of equity and access. This framework provided an early, yet fundamental understanding of how we understand “literacy”.

The emergence of digital technology gave rise to the importance of looking at literacy beyond print, and to understanding the transformative affordances of digital technologies. As Baynham & Prinsloo point out “the focus has shifted from the local to the translocal, from print based literacies to electronic and multimedia literacies and from the verbal to the multimodal” (Baynham & Prinsloo, 2009).

In operationalizing my own model of digital literacies, I draw from multiple concepts. From the NLS, I view digital literacies as a socio-cultural practice, embedded within a community context. Digital literacies also moves beyond the local, and has an appreciation for the global networked world we live in. This cosmopolitan perspective on culture (Zuckerman, 2014; Appiah, 2008), moves beyond traditional concepts of literacy and acknowledges the affordances of digital environments to support collaboration and co-creation of multi-media texts.

The question that emerges from understanding digital literacies as moving beyond the local, how do we reconcile this idea while still retaining a culturally sensitive perspective?