Literacy Teams
Apple versus Android. Google versus Microsoft. Blackboard versus Canvas. All of these concepts and programs are examples of digital literacy. If someone is raised in a family that uses Apple products, eventually, they will learn how to use those products and own an iPhone. The person has developed “Apple literacy” (not to be confused with “apple literacy,” in which the person is literate in… the fruit?). If we give someone with Apple literacy an Android phone and tell them to navigate it, what would happen? The person has never used an Android. Therefore, they do not have Android literacy. The same scenario applies to the other two aforementioned match-ups. This begs the question: what exactly is digital literacy?
Literacy vs Fluency
First, I want to highlight the difference between literacy and fluency. Literacy, as defined by Kress in Doug Eyman’s section Digital Literacy, is “the term which refers to (the knowledge of) the use of the resource of writing” (Eyman 46). Fluency is a step above literacy, and refers to not only the knowledge of using said resource, but the mastered ability to use it. Eyman discusses tons of “digital literacies” in this section, and he refers to Carmen Luke’s ideas of “multiliteracies” as well. However, is there a digital fluency, or is that an entirely different can of worms? If we take what we know about literacy and fluency and add “digital” to fluency, things get tricky. Given the notion that there can be multiple digital literacies, becoming digitally fluent is nearly impossible. The simple answer is, digital fluency is its own umbrella.
Literacy is Contextual
So then, if digital literacy is an umbrella, can one be literate in multiple digital concepts? Absolutely. However, I discussed with classmates that digital literacy is “contextual.” What this means is that there are different contexts with these literacies. If someone is taken out of one context and put into another, this new context may be foreign to them. My idea for this analysis was that each “context” is a smaller form of digital literacy. For example, Kean’s transition from Google to Microsoft is a shift from one context to another. Students and faculty were taken out of the context of Google, the software they were familiar with, and placed into Microsoft. The same thing occurred when Kean switched from using Blackboard to using Canvas. Two different contexts that one may or may not be familiar with.
The idea that digital literacy is contextual adds to the notion that it is an umbrella term. There are many forms of digital literacy, all different, but they exist under the same umbrella. These literacies may overlap; someone may be familiar with one “context” or another. However, I agree with Eyman that digital literacy is the appropriate term for this concept as it relates to digital rhetoric.
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