Last week I mentioned that I would write a post discussing the gaps I see in current descriptions of digital literacy, particularly as it’s described in the popular press, and why a more holistic or even interdisciplinary understanding of digital literacy is needed. Well I’m back this week to continue that discussion. We must move beyond the idea that digital literacy is about teaching people how to create a website or learn to code. We need to recognize that a skills based approach to digital literacy will only serve to exacerbate certain social and democratic challenges inherent in digital communication, and we must instead consider digital literacy as something that stretches far beyond equipping students for jobs that may or may not exist in the ever-fickle digital economy. The best example, I think ,of why this is the case is the current problem of “fake news”.

Using fake news as an example, if we approach digital literacy as a case of teaching kids to code, we miss out on opportunities to change the ways that people think about information and the role it plays in their lives. We create a world in which people look for a technological solution to what is essentially a human psychology problem, and we create citizens who potentially lack the capacity to critically assess any information that comes their way, digital or otherwise. We may indeed provide students in this case with skills that allow them to get an entry level “job of the future”, but we do not equip them to lead in the society that will be created through all of these new digital opportunities. In other words, in this case, we can train an army of hackers to spread fake news, but are not training the defense against the problem.

Instead, a digital literacy education should be interdisciplinary insofar as it trains students to look at the technological AND the social AND the cultural AND the business AND the creative sides of digital technology. That is to say, were we to apply this type of approach to fake news, we would attempt to understand WHAT narratives drive people to share content (the creative), how online sharing impacts the social connections of people (the social), how online sharing can support or undermine democratic communication (the cultural), how the media business supports the proliferation of fake news (the business) and how algorithms work in tandem with social pressures to drive content forward (the technological). We would develop a critical literacy towards all information, not only online sources in our students, and we would challenge them to look beyond established platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter for answers to their most common every day questions. This could create an opportunity for students to think about ways they can use technologies to innovate, rather than relegating them to code for someone else.

We assume that these technologies are here to “disrupt” our lives for good or for ill, because this is the narrative that suits large tech companies and their investors. We don’t often challenge these narratives, and thus digital literacy is about training students to cope with a future disruption that we’re told is coming. Instead, I think that digital literacy should be include preparing students to understand the culture and power that is shaping technologies future, so that they can decide if they want to buy into the rhetoric of disruption, or go in a different direction. This cannot happen without a holistic look at the role of digital technologies in our lives, and is much more than an hour a week spent with robot turtles.