Running head: DIGITAL LITERACY 1

Digital Literacy

John Rymal

Oakland University

Professor Allen

Author Note: Prepared for Professor Allens WRT 394, Literacy,

Technology, and Civic Engagement.
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Digital Literacy

I was born in 1992. All my life, educators seemed to cling to alphabetic

literacy in the traditional sense, while all around me a new literacy had

already emerged. It was not always their fault, I attended a rural school in

northern Michigan, my graduating class was 65 people; funding was not

abundant. The necessary projectors, computers, televisions and other

equipment for teaching digital literacy were not always available. Certainly,

there were some reluctant old souls who clung to outmoded means of doing

things, torturing us with cursive writing. Still, I managed to learn these things

on my own time, reluctantly, I must admit, I am caught between needing

technology and not wanting to rely on it in any way. Now the old literacies

that we emphasized so strongly dont play any part in my life, I havent

written in cursive in almost a decade. As Gail Hawisher, Cynthia Selfe,

Brittney Moraski and Melissa Pearson (2004) state, Almost without

exception, the narratives suggest to us that literacies may accumulate more

rapidly in the lives of some people when a culture is undergoing a

particularly dramatic or radical transition. (664) This certainly holds true for

myself. Being born in the early 90s put me right on the middle of a shift from

print to digital media, and a massive increase in visual media and rhetoric. I

was taught to write in cursive, use the Dewey Decimal System, obtain

information from an encyclopedia. My literacy log- mostly filled with

instances of visual argument on social media- got me thinking about the shift
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from print to digital literacy, which often involves no writing at all. I am on

the brink of graduating college and I have forgotten all those things-cursive,

the Dewey Decimal System- completely, but Ive learned how to type rapidly,

research on an online database, edit things digitally. How much easier would

higher education have been if I had already been formally familiarized with

those skills? Turner and Hicks (2012) ask the question, why teachers of

writing must embrace digital writing as a composition process in order to

help their students to participate in larger conversations about what it means

to be literate as well as what it means to participate in a community.(57)

I hope to answer at least part of this this question through a very

narrow scope, focusing on the pervasiveness of imagery and other aspects of

digital communication on social media and the internet that can be

informative when used correctly, and manipulative and harmful if misapplied.

This will also serve to demonstrate the importance of being educated in

digital literacies.

Digital Literacy: Initial Exposure and Social Media

My exposure to digital literacy began the same as many peoples,

through video games. I can identify strongly with Hawisher et als (2004)

quote Computer games rapidly became a family activity. This mostly

revolved around the Nintendo games from the late 80s and early 90s, so

instances of rhetoric in the games were few and far between, but it began to

set a foundation for the way I game now, which is primarily online and
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involves a lot of communication with people around the world. Hawisher et al

(2004) inform us that schools are not the sole-and, often, not even the

primary-gateways through which people gain access to and practice digital

literacies,(644) and this was certainly the case with me. However, it would

have certainly been beneficial to me if I had been taught some sort of digital

literacy before I entered college. Even for people not pursuing higher

education, digital literacy is a beneficial skill. We were seldom exposed to

computers in my school, and when we were it was basically used as a type

writer. I always had one at home, though I didnt pay much attention to it

until the birth of Myspace and Facebook. As Hawisher et al (2004) have told

us:

While physical access to computers is necessary, it is not

sufficient for developing digital literacies. Rather, the specific

conditions of access (and the timing of these conditions) seem to

be important in determining when and how people acquire and

develop effective sets of technological literacy skills- or, indeed,

if they choose to do so.(673)

For me, these specific conditions didnt occur until I was in high

school, and now it is something I use regularly that requires a large amount

of digital literacy. My entry into social media was quite a lot like Brittneys

from Hawisher et al (2004), As a sophisticated fifteen-year-old, she

observed that computer-based literacy had become a means of extending

the personal relationships of her friends. (658) Although we grew up in a

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similar area and under similar circumstances, Brittney seems to have been

exposed to them more than myself, or perhaps just took a greater interest in

using them. She does note that I just dove into computers as a young child,

and I used it, especially in word processing, often before many of my peers.

(657)

Now, everyone who is one social media sites such as these usually

obtain some sort of digital literacy. For those that do, we are constantly

bombarded with instances of visual arguments and rhetoric. My literacy log

made me stop and think about the messages we see without realizing it on

social media. We are exposed to memes, which consist of an image (without

explanation) and a caption. Knowing memes is a certain literacy in its own

right, the meaning and tone of the written caption only makes sense if you

recognize the symbolic meaning of the image, whose meaning is gained

through repetitive use. We see images constantly, filling our newsfeeds,

pictures next to online articles that are meant to grab our attention, sway our

opinions. These articles themselves are filled with hyperlinks that allow us to

follow them to other resources to expand our knowledge of items contained

in the article. Even peoples profile pictures are in general trying to tell us

something. It could be a picture of them looking especially attractive, doing a

hobby, or even words, but in any case they are using digital literacy to try

and tell us something. The entire idea of a social media profile is trying to

influence peoples perception of you, and by being literate in social media

you are able to gain information about other people.

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A Gap in Digital Literacy Education

I was aware of all these components of digital literacy, and yet some of

my instructors treated digital literacy as a complete afterthought, their styles

of teaching it completely rudimentary and often inaccurate. As Hawisher et

al (2004) point out many composition instructors have been raised and

educated in a world that focuses on alphabetic, print literacy, (677) and

they themselves continued this practice. It seemed as though they believed

that the way to teach digital literacy was simply as an extension of print

literacy, rather than a form of literacy of its own with its own set of modes.

This truly held them back, as Turner and Hicks (2012) state in order to

embrace contemporary understandings of writing, teachers must first

uncover their own biases and develop their own literacies.(57) To employ

technology only as a tool, to embrace it only in the context of the print

literacies that they were familiar with, these things allowed for a huge

missed opportunity in my education. As Hawisher et al (2004) say, In this

context, teachers cannot take full advantage of the literacy strengths

computer-savvy kids bring to the classroom and may miss some important

opportunities to link their own instructional goals to the developing literacy

strengths of these talented young people. (672) A Gateway to the

Literacies of Technology was closed.

There is also a disparity in resources between different areas, even

within our own country, that play a part in digital literacy. From Damon Davis,

a case study in Hawisher et al (2004): [F]rom where Im from, computers

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were not the big thingNo computer at home, uh, actually nobody I knew in

the neighborhood had one. (658) Even where these digital literacy tools are

present, in the absence of instructors knowledgeable in them at school, it

can take great initiative for a student to pursue digital literacy on their own,

as Brittney from Hawisher et al demonstrates: Before Brittney was sixteen,

she was reading books on Web design, HTML coding, using programs like

Photoshop, and enrolling in online distance education classes to supplement

her education in a small, rural town. (659) And for people like me who

lacked that initiative, growing up in a small, rural town meant you were a bit

behind when you got to college.

Awareness of Visual Arguments

My literacy log made me realize the depth to which visual arguments

have been engrained in our society, whether that is through social media,

advertisements, articles, t-shirts, or the myriad other possible ways that

visual arguments can be employed. For the most part, visual arguments aid

us. They can pass information to us at a glance (graphs, tables, charts), they

can make us realize the scope of a problem, for instance, macro level photos

of the devastation of a city after a natural disaster, as we saw in Haiti. They

can provide pathos appeals in an argument where it is applicable (those

damn Sarah McLachlan commercials). There is a literacy to visual arguments,

and when you recognize it you can use it as a powerful communication tool.

Our society has fully embraced visual arguments. As Jewitt and Kress (2003)

explain, this finely-honed skill has historical precedent:

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These regularities are what have been called grammars;

traditionally. The more work a culture has put into such a

resource, for whatever reasons, and the more it has been used in

the social life of a particular community, the more fully and finely

articulated it will have become. Speech is such a resource, as is

writing, and so are the sign-languages of communities of the

hearing-impaired. Likewise, images have been developed into a

mode in various places in the world and at various times,

whether as the character-based writing system of Chinese (and

Japanese); the hieroglyphic system of ancient Egypt, itself a

precursor to the alphabetic writing systems of the world; and

other visual systems. (2)

This is a good thing. As I said, visual argument has a huge role in our

communication today, helped in large part by the internet and social media,

visuals aid the clarity and message of nearly every article, blog, or social

media post that is online.

My literacy log brought to light a problem: those not truly literate in

visual argument and digital communication would seem to often fall victim to

manipulative and harmful uses of the medium. By literate, I mean the ability

to discern exactly what the visual or digital communication is saying, who is

saying it, and being able to view it critically. I dont have statistics on the

demographic affected by this (although a few family members come to mind)

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it is simply a something I notice frequently on social media. Examples of this

are fake news posts from sites whose names themselves are evidence of

political bias. These posts often feature images and graphs that misrepresent

data, or are used strictly to cause alarm in the person viewing them. A

specific example of this that I recently found was a chart released by the

Republican Senate Budget Committee. The headline for the graph was Over

100-million people in U.S. Now Receiving Some Form of Federal Welfare.

The graph paired with this headline was a set of red-colored vertical bars.

The bar furthest on the left (year: 2009) was fully half the height of the

farthest bar on the right side (year: 2011). The image would imply that the

number of people on welfare doubled in those two years. Closer examination

reveals the y-axis of the graph starts at about 94-million and topped out at

108-million, if this y-axis were to start at zero, this difference in the number

of people on welfare would look closer to a ten percent increase. This is just

one instance of this misrepresentation of visual data, but during my reading

log I noted them constantly: click-bait ads, news sites, blogs, all taken (given

the context of the social media posts they were included in) at face value

without further examination. This lack of examination only further promotes

the spread of misinformation and inflammatory statements in a world that is

already rife with both.

Is this tendency to take these images and communications at face a

value a result of a lack of education in digital literacy? I certainly noticed a

tendency by older people in my social media sphere-those who were

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certainly not taught digital literacy in high school- to make fake news posts

and use questionable visual arguments frequently, but certainly not

exclusively.

Final Thoughts

Ive had first-hand experience in the ways that disparities in digital

literacies tools can affect long term learning prospects in our society. The

large majority of the problems I faced were not down to an educator who was

deliberately dragging their feet, but one that was misinformed or not

empowered to teach us those skills. Ive certainly seen how this is changing

even in the years since I graduated high school, people I talk to now say that

computers and digital literacies have become pretty well integrated into the

classroom, and thank god, they stopped teaching cursive, to the horror of

every person over forty that I know. I hope that this trend continues, as the

ramifications extend beyond education, into our social lives, politics, and

society as a whole.

As social media and the internet continue to phase out print literacy,

issues such as fake news and visual arguments will only increase in use.

Across the board digital literacy education will help to give people the tools

to acquire digital literacy if they choose.

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References

Hawisher, G.E., Moraski, B., Pearson, M., Selfe, C.L., (June, 2004) Becoming

literate in the information age: Cultural ecologies and the literacies of

technology. College Composition and Communication, 55(4) Pp. 642-

692. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4140666

Hicks, Troy. Turner, K.H., (2012) Thats not writing: Exploring the

intersection of digital writing, community literacy, and social justice.

Community Literacy Journal. 6(1) Pp.55-78. DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1353/clj.2012.0000
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Kress, G. Jewitt, C. (2003) Multimodal literacy. New York, New York. Peter

Lang