Digital Literacy

Media Literacy, Digital Literacy … What’s the Diff?

It’s possible your grasp on the need for media literacy is somewhat weak, yet you’re now being asked to grapple with digital literacy. That means there’s a bit of catching up to do.

Media literacy is the ability to think critically about the endless flood of messages sent by media organizations (e.g., films, shows, news reports) to a general, undifferentiated public, as well as those we receive via our highly individualized social media feeds. It’s all about how we interpret and respond to those messages—consciously or unconsciously.

Traditional media literacy assumes a passive population that consumes a significant volume of messages, from which a common culture is built. Common culture emerges when there are touchstones—shared, collective experiences—that bind us together as a society.

Think of it like water-cooler culture: People taking a break, standing around the office water cooler, and talking to coworkers about a television show that everyone watched last night. If you didn’t watch, you’re left out. And next week you watch so you can share in the water-cooler conversation.

Digital literacy is different, largely because technology has changed how we communicate, what we consume, across what platforms we consume it, and via what devices. Digital literacy also is concerned with our interpretation of and response to messages, but is more focused on the cultural impact of the technologies delivering the information.

Digital information typically involves both passive consumption and active production of highly personalized messages. It holds the promise of being interactive, where producers become audiences for users, and users produce content for each other. But from a historical perspective, the result is both fragmentation and the erosion of common culture.

Think of it as spoiler culture: People still take work breaks, but they don’t leave their desks (or sometimes even their homes). Instead, they turn to digital tools that enable the near-instant transmission of cultural symbols from person to person via internet-connected digital devices.

Because we are all consuming information across different channels, we don’t share reference points that are anchored in time and space. For example, you may choose when to watch your favorite television show and via what medium, rather than being held to a network schedule and required to watch on a television set. “Gilligan’s Island” from 1964 on Hulu? Check. (Just don’t tell me how it ends.)

The difference between water-cooler culture and spoiler culture—media literacy versus digital literacy—is the method of transmission.

Instead of person-to-person and media-to-masses, spoiler culture is a digitally mediated world of individuals. Even if every person were on the same social media platform, it is unlikely that common culture would emerge. That’s because it’s not the platform that matters; it’s the information feed. And every digital feed is unique. Each is customized to reflect the user’s personal interests, values, history, and increasingly, brand.

In the past, television was a social medium that encouraged people to watch shows together. Even if you weren’t in the same household, you could share the experience of having watched the same show (aka common culture).

Digital literacy means understanding “television” as both a social and a solitary thing to do. Sometimes we gather around the TV. Sometimes we watch on our digital devices alone—or perhaps even chat with other people on similar devices in different places at the same time.

It’s increasingly rare for individuals to watch what everyone else is watching or even consume information across one digital device at a time. In fact, you may be physically in a room watching TV with others, while skimming content on a laptop or tablet and interacting with others on a smartphone.

For that matter, television no longer exists as a stand-alone cultural norm for a decent chunk of the U.S. population, particularly those who have given up, or never signed up for, cable TV. A great deal of what might be termed TV content now is consumed on digital devices, including TVs, accessed via video streaming services.

If you’ve ever watched a made-for-TV series via a streaming service, you’ll note that each episode is the same length and there are logical points where advertising would have been placed. Those shows were created for a world bound by time.

If you watch a made-for-streaming series or user-generated video on YouTube and choose not to pay for an ad-free service, you’ll note that the episodes can vary wildly in length and ads may be dropped in at the most inopportune times. They’re not pauses built into the plot, they’re payment for watching. Those shows were created for a world bound by individual preference.

Existing and emergent technologies have put more of everything at our fingertips and in our brains than ever before. We have not discarded previous media as new have arisen; instead, we have accumulated—print, film, radio, television, cable television, internet, World Wide Web, social media, apps, and so on.

A digital information environment is one in which the medium—the device through which we access information—has a larger social impact than the message—the content we receive through a particular medium.

As a result, we need to critically consider what it means to be a citizen in an information landscape that not only has been individualized but also is constantly in flux.

We also need to understand that consumables—from user-generated content to social media feeds to streaming video—have increased exponentially. And much of that content is being consumed online and alone.

One concern with information inundation is that people no longer will be interested in what is real or even relevant to their physical lives, disrupting our ability to reason and participate reasonably in a democratic society. Media theorist Neil Postman speculated that we would become increasingly immersed in “a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again.”¹

Postman wasn’t opposed to entertainment, but he was conscious of increasing levels of distraction. He understood that people need the escape that entertainment offers, but he predicted that the rise of electronic media and increased focus on entertainment could have a two-fold effect on common culture and civic participation. In summary,

1. 1. People wouldn’t know what actually affects their lives; and,
2. 2. They wouldn’t know what they should do, even if they could figure it out.

If No One Is Gatekeeping, How Do We Know What’s True?

In the world that print once ruled, the mass media tended to be assessed as purveyors of “capital-T-Truth,” as in there is a Truth that can be discovered, verified, and agreed upon. This makes some sense, given the heavy use of newspapers as historical archives. The fact that print stories were finished and frozen in time granted them a degree of credibility not possible from any other medium.

Digital reality is more complicated, largely due to the volume of information being contributed from a multitude of voices. Because both journalists and the public are participating, this information flow often is viewed as “lowercase-t-truth,” which implies that most observations are not the truth but simply one perspective from one point of view at one point in time. Or, as with Wikipedia, a negotiated perspective.

While this muddies source credibility on many levels, we don’t necessarily want legacy media to help out with this problem by gatekeeping the flood of information.² We don’t want the media to tell us what to think about, but want to discover the relevance to our lives ourselves. We want highly personalized content and to have the ability to share, challenge, and fact-check it in real time.

Paradoxically, content no longer is filtered exclusively by journalists but—by design and necessity—is filtered by complex computer algorithms that underpin browsers, search engines, and social media.

In short, our content is still subject to gatekeeping, but by the platform media companies that act as our conduit to the content—most notably the products of Alphabet (YouTube, Google) and Meta (Facebook, Instagram).

This type of dissemination gives corporations great power over individual information consumption and privacy, even as it allows people to think they are choosing what information they want to consume and from whom. It’s also indicative of our existence in a post-narrative world, where overarching stories, an informed electorate, and the quest for Truth are being challenged by personal opinions, divisive ideologies, and individual truths.

As a result, much of what we consume reflects an algorithm-constructed impression of our own values and beliefs right back at us. We chat, message, comment, text, and like; we post, pin, subscribe (as long as it’s free), and share—effectively witnessing everything from snacks to global politics through the screens of digital devices.

And this is an environment that allows individual users to share their knowledge—and their biases—to a much wider audience than ever before.

One need only think of Wikipedia to understand the ways in which the web allows users to collaborate and build deep reservoirs of knowledge about an endless range of topics. But as any high school teacher will tell you, Wikipedia is a starting point, not a definitive source of information—and you should not always believe what you skim. This is because people with a specific ideology can slant information by inundating the marketplace with their ideas or overwriting the ideas of others.

For example, prolific Wikipedia contributor Bryan Henderson, who goes by the name of “Giraffedata,” took it upon himself to eradicate use of the term “comprised of” from user-generated content on the popular information site.³ Over the course of eight years, Giraffedata removed the term more than 47,000 times in user postings.

Was this a grammatically sound move? Arguably, yes. But the fact that the “error” was made in more than 47,000 posts (and counting) speaks to the fact that the use of “comprised of” is common and acceptable.