Understanding Digital Literacies

A Practical Introduction

Rodney H. Jones, Christoph A. Hafner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000394030
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Understanding Digital Literacies Second Edition provides an accessible and timely introduction to new media literacies. This book equips students with the theoretical and analytical tools with which to explore the linguistic dimensions and social impact of a range of digital literacy practices. Each chapter in the volume covers a different topic, presenting an overview of the major concepts, issues, problems, and debates surrounding it, while also encouraging students to reflect on and critically evaluate their own language and communication practices.

Features of the second edition include:

• expanded coverage of a diverse range of digital media practices that now includes Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Tinder, and WhatsApp;

• two entirely new chapters on mobility and materiality, and surveillance and privacy;

• updated activities in each chapter which engage students in reflecting on and analysing their own media use;

• e-resources featuring a glossary of key terms and supplementary material for each chapter, including additional activities and links to useful websites, articles, and videos.

This book is an essential textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying courses in new media and digital literacies.

Chapter 1

Mediated me

It’s hard to think of anything we do nowadays, from working on projects to socializing with friends, that is not somehow mediated through digital technologies. It’s not just that we’re doing ‘old things’ in ‘new ways’. Digital technologies are actually introducing new things for us to do like tweeting, memeing, and gramming. They have also made new social practices available to people who may not have our best interests in mind, practices like trolling, hatelinking, and catfishing. They have given private companies the ability to track our every move and to use that information to manipulate us. They have given governments an unprecedented ability to monitor their citizens and to disrupt political processes in other countries. They have given unscrupulous politicians a heightened ability to deceive people, to distort reality, and even to call into question the whole idea of ‘truth’ itself. And they have given ordinary people new ways of harassing, exposing, or terrorising others.

These new practices, both good and bad, require from people new skills, new ways of thinking, and new methods of managing their relationships with others. Some examples of these include:

• The ability to quickly search through and evaluate great masses of information;
• The ability to create coherent reading pathways through linked texts;
• The ability to separate the ‘true’ from the ‘fake’ in a complex information eco-system;
• The ability to quickly make connections between widely disparate ideas and domains of experience;
• The ability to shoot and edit digital photos and video;
• The ability to create complex multimodal documents (such as Instagram ‘stories’) that combine words, graphics, video, and audio;
• The ability to create and maintain dynamic online profiles and manage large and complex online social networks;
• The ability to explore and navigate online worlds and digitally ‘augmented’ physical spaces and to interact in virtual and ‘digical’ environments;
• The ability to manage constant surveillance by peers and private companies and to protect one’s personal data and ‘identity’ from being misused by others.

Some people just pick up these abilities along the way by surfing the web, playing online games, posting to social networking platforms, and using mobile apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp. But people are not always very conscious of how these practices change not just the way they communicate but also ‘who they can be’ and the kinds of relationships they can have with others. They are also sometimes not conscious of the kinds of things others might be using digital technologies to do to them, and how their use of digital media can make them vulnerable to exposure or abuse.

The purpose of this book is not just to help you become better at the things you use digital media to do, or to make you better at protecting yourself from those who might be using digital media to do things to you. It is also to help you understand how digital media are affecting the way you make meanings, the way you relate to others, the kind of person you can be, and even the way you think. We believe that the best way to become a more competent user of technologies is to become more critical and reflective about how you use them, the kinds of things that they allow you to do, and the kinds of things they might prevent you from doing.

This book is not just about computers, mobile phones, the internet, and other digital media. It’s about the process of mediation, the age-old human practice of using tools to take action in the world. In this introductory chapter we will explain the concept of mediation and how it relates to the definition of ‘digital literacies’ which we will be developing throughout this book.

Mediation

A medium is something that stands in-between two things or people and facilitates interaction between them. Usually when we think of ‘mediated interaction’ we think of things like ‘computer-mediated communication’ or messages delivered via ‘mass media’ like television, radio, or newspapers. But the fact is, all interaction—and indeed all human action—is in some way mediated.

This was the insight of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who spent his life observing how children learn. All learning, he realized, involves learning how to use some kind of tool that facilitates interaction between the child and the thing or person he or she is interacting with. To learn to eat, you have to learn to use a spoon or a fork or chopsticks, which come between you and the food and facilitate the action of eating. To learn to read, you have to learn to use language and objects like books that come between you and the people who are trying to reach you through their writing and facilitate the action of communication.

These cultural tools that mediate our actions are of many kinds. Some are physical objects like spoons and books. Some are more abstract ‘codes’ or ‘systems of meaning’ such as languages, counting systems, and computer code. The ability to use such tools, according to Vygotsky, is the hallmark of human consciousness. All higher mental processes, he said, depend upon mediation. In order to do anything or mean anything or have any kind of relationship with anyone else, you need to use tools. In a sense, the definition of a person is a human being plus the tools that are available for that human being to interact with the world.

These tools that we use to mediate between ourselves and the world can be thought of as extensions of ourselves. In fact, the famous Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan (1964) called media ‘the extensions of man.’ He didn’t just mean things that we traditionally think of as media like televisions and newspapers, but also things like light bulbs, cars, and human language, in short, all mediational means which facilitate action. The spoon we use to eat with is an extension of our hand. Microscopes and telescopes are extensions of our eyes. Microphones are extensions of our voices. Cars and trains and busses might be considered extensions of our feet, and computers and smartphones might be considered extensions of our brains (though, as we will show in the rest of this book, the ways computers and the internet extend our capabilities goes far beyond things like memory and cognition).

The point that both Vygotsky and McLuhan were trying to make was not just that cultural tools allow us to do new things, but that they come to define us in some very basic ways. They usually don’t just affect our ability to do a particular task. They also affect the way we relate to others, the way we communicate, and the way we think. As McLuhan (1964: 2) puts it: ‘Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.’ Cars, trains, and busses, for example, don’t just allow us to move around faster; they fundamentally change the way we experience and think about space and time, the kinds of relationships we can have with people who live far away from us, and the kinds of societies we can build. A microphone doesn’t just make my voice louder. It gives me the ability to communicate to a large number of people at one time, thus changing the kinds of relationships I can have with those people and the kinds of messages I can communicate to them.

On the one hand, these tools enable us to do new things, think in new ways, express new kinds of meanings, establish new kinds of relationships, and be new kinds of people. On the other hand, they also prevent us from doing other things, of thinking in other ways, of having other kinds of relationships, and of being other kinds of people. In other words, all tools bring with them different kinds of affordances and constraints. The way McLuhan puts it, while new technologies extend certain parts of us, they amputate other parts. While a microphone allows me to talk to a large number of people at one time, it makes it more difficult for me to talk to just one of those people privately, and while a train makes it easier for me to quickly go from one place to another, it makes it more difficult for me to stop along the way and chat with the people I pass.

Case study: The wristwatch

Before mobile telephones with built-in digital timekeepers became so pervasive, few technologies seemed more like ‘extensions’ of our bodies than wristwatches. Sometimes people even think of watches as extensions of their minds. Consider the following conversation:

• A: Excuse me, do you know what time it is?
• B: Sure
• (looks at his watch)
• It’s 4:15.

In his book Natural Born Cyborgs (2003), Andy Clark points to conversations like this as evidence that we consider tools like watches not as separate objects, but as part of ourselves. When B says ‘sure’ in response to the question about whether or not he knows the time, he does so before he looks at his watch. In other words, just having the watch on his wrist makes him feel like he ‘knows’ the time, and looking at the watch to retrieve the time is not very different from retrieving a fact from his mind.

Before the sixteenth century, timepieces were much too large to carry around because they depended on pendulums and other heavy mechanical workings. Even domestic clocks were rare at that time. Most people depended on the church tower and other public clocks in order to know the time.

This all changed with the invention of the mainspring, a coiled piece of metal which, after being wound tightly, unwinds, moving the hands of the timepiece. This small invention made it possible for ‘time’ to be ‘portable’. In the seventeenth century, pocket watches became popular among the rich. Most people, though, continued to rely on public clocks, mostly because there was no need for them to be constantly aware of the time.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century that watches became popular accessories for normal people to wear on their wrists. In the beginning, they were considered fashion accessories worn only by women. There are a number of stories about how wristwatches came to be more commonly used. One involves Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, who in 1904 complained that it was difficult to fly his plane while looking at his pocket watch. So his friend, Louis Cartier, developed a watch that he could wear on his wrist, which eventually became the first commercially produced men’s wristwatch. According to another account, during WWI, soldiers strapped their watches to their wrists in order to enable them to coordinate their actions in battle while leaving their hands free to carry their weapons. These early wristwatches were known as ‘trench-watches,’ after the trenches of WWI.

These two examples demonstrate the new affordances introduced by the simple technology of strapping a watch to one’s wrist. It allowed soldiers and aviators to do things they were unable to do before, that is, to keep track of time while fighting or flying their planes. Some might even argue that these new affordances contributed to changes in the nature of war as well as the development of modern aviation.

This ability to ‘carry the time around’ also introduced new possibilities in the business and commercial worlds. The development of railroads as well as the ‘scientific management’ of assembly-line factories both depended on people’s ability to keep close track of the time.

Of course, these developments also changed people’s relationships with one another. Human interaction became more a matter of scheduled meetings rather than chance encounters. People were expected to be in a certain place at a certain time. The notions of being ‘on time’ and ‘running late’ became much more important.

Along with these changes in relationships came changes in the way people thought about time. Time became something abstract, less a function of nature (the rising and setting of the sun) and more a function of what people’s watches said. When people wanted to know when to eat, they didn’t consult their stomachs, they consulted their wrists. Time became something that could be divided up and parcelled out. Part of managing the self was being able to manage time. Time became like money. Finally, time became something that one was meant to be constantly aware of. One of the worst things that could happen to someone was to ‘lose track of time’.

With the development of electronic watches, portable timepieces became accurate to the tenth or even the hundredth of a second. This new accuracy further changed how people thought about how time could be divided up. Before the 1960s, the second was the smallest measurement of time most normal people could even conceive of.

Ever since the development of pocket watches, timepieces have always had a role in communicating social identity and status. After wristwatches became popular, however, this role became even more pronounced. Many people regard watches as symbols of wealth, status, taste, or personality. It makes a big difference whether or not someone is wearing a Rolex or a Casio. In fact, with the ubiquity of time on computer screens, mobile phones, and other devices, the timekeeping function of wristwatches is becoming less important than their function as markers of social identity and status.

Nowadays, many of the timepieces that people wear on their wrists don’t just tell the time, but do other things as well, such as track their steps and their heartbeat, connect them to others via text or voice messages, and remind them about important appointments. The new affordances of ‘smart’ watches have further altered the way people conceive of space and time in relation to their bodies and their movement through the world. They have also had a profound effect on their social identities and their privacy, allowing them, for example, to share statistics about their physical activities with others, and allowing the companies that make these watches or design apps for them to gather data about their wearers’ whereabouts and activities every moment of the day.

The obvious question is whether it was the development of the wristwatch that bro...