Digital Literacy

Digital literacy is a new concept for me this year. It has been nice getting my head wrapped around the idea and to start to understand its full meaning. Being digitally literate can mean a lot of things. From being able to post a thought a twitter to being able to upload a document from Microsoft word for a class. This is just the surface of what it means to be digitally literate. Being able to participate in all of the different ways to communicate in this day in age is very impressive for the people who have achieved this. There is so many different ways for people to communicate as well with the ability to be digitally literate. As stated in the Adolescents’ New Literacies with and Through Mobile Phones, “the ability to share photographs and other visual media, small pictograms, and the appearance of camera-first applications like Instagram and Snapchat has meant the mobile phone- based communication has become progressively more visual and multimodal.” (pg. 63) What this quote is getting across is that with all the new technologies in this era there are so many different way of communication and it is common for the younger generations to know all of these ways. With social media sites like Instagram and Twitter there is multiple ways to share your opinions and feelings. The process is so quick and effortless which means so many more people are poised to have an opinion on these types of sites. This could cause issues and can cause good conversations to start but wherever it goes being digitally literate puts you a grand conversation with the whole world. Sites like Instagram are very social and the pictures you like will lead you to other pictures you like. “On Instagram, one’s “followers” can post feedback in a response to a user’s postings in forms of likes or by leaving a comment.” (pg. 65) This comes from the mobile phones reading we had in class and this is an important passage when thinking about digital literacy. One must now what they are liking and what they are commenting one because these likes and comments are seen by everyone. They shape your profile and can shape what others think of you in the real world. It is crazy that what you do on a social media site can affect the ay others look at your or feel about you. That is just the day in age we are in and being digitally literate helps to not go in the wrong direction.

Text has come to have a whole different definition now that we are in a digitally literate society. Motoko Rich claimed in a New York Times article that “What is different now… is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or britneyspears.org, entails engagement with text.” (pg. 1) This comes from one of readings we had in class Reading by Design: Two Case Studies of Digital Reading Practices. What Rich is saying in this quote is that text is so much more than just what comes out of a book now. This is important to understand when talking about being literate in a digital since because text has become such a wide variety of outlets today. From text on a website to just the commercials you see on television. There is so many ways for information to reach the ears and eyes of the people. There are so many skills people have to have to be digitally literate. As stated in the Reading by Design article “skills needed to engage multimodal texts require readers to understand the significance of sounds and visual narratives as much as written narratives.” (pg. 2) So much goes into multimodal text and being able to decipher all of the meanings takes a very well put together mind. Just being able to wrap your head around such a concept is the most impressive aspect. 30 years ago people would have never guessed that communicating and getting information out would be this easy.

The exact definition for digital literacy is a tough one but I found one that can make the meaning clear. This comes from the American Library Association’s digital-literacy task force and they say “digital literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.” (Heitin) Another definition that is helpful come Hiller Spires who is a professor of literacy at North Carolina State University and he breaks it down to three buckets. The three are finding and consuming digital content, creating digital content, and communicating or sharing the digital content. (Heitin) This shows that there is so many aspects to being digitally literate. It is a very important skill to have and a vital skill we must teach the youth.