A critical perspective on online participation and digital literacies

In this post I want to engage with the idea of what it means to participate online, and to unpack the notion of digital literacies. Most media scholars and quite a number of educators are familiar with the work of Henry Jenkins (2006), who coined the term “participatory culture” in relation to the affordances of the online space. According to Jenkins, fans in online communities are able to speak back to the producers of media, participate in new forms of media production, and even develop a protopolitical subjectivity. This, for Jenkins, is a far cry from the days of broadcast media, when fans could only passively consume media, and the extent of their contribution was to make purchases – think for example of the work of Dallas Smythe (reproduced 2012) who conceptualised the audience commodity. Or of Adorno and Horkheimer (reproduced 2012), for whom television and film constituted the culture industry. Compared to this view of being an audience, the range of activities people can engage in online obviously raises them from consumers to something more.

Yet what that something more is, and whether in fact it gives people the agency that Jenkins argued it does, is the subject of debate. For Christian Fuchs (2013), for example, calling what fans do online “participatory culture” is a perversion of the democratic roots of the term. According to Fuchs, there is little agency in furthering the profit goals of a corporation. For Trebor Scholz (2013), erstwhile passive consumers now producing media in digital spaces – user generated content – raises questions about the exploitation of digital labour.

So the notion of online participation is in fact quite complex, and it is worth thinking beyond the assumption that “doing things online” is necessarily participation. Indeed it becomes even more important to approach this critically when we think about the field of education. As technology enters more and more deeply into the educational space, it creates some possibilities, but it also raises some questions. And this is where I think that we need to look at the imperative to develop digital literacies more critically.

This is especially so when we look at the origins of educational technology. Friesen (2010) tracks the development of instructional technology and shows how it is closely connected to the US military-industrial complex. His paper “[traces] the imprint left by the US military on instructional technology and design…[and] considers how this influence may now extend, like the Internet itself, into schools and the university” (p. 71). What does digital literacy mean in this context?

In thinking about the term “digital literacy”, David Buckingham (2006) asks whether we really need another literacy to add to a very long list of literacies. Noting that most advocates of digital literacy at the time tended to focus on skills relating to information, he argues that this form of literacy in fact should be more critical, expanding to include “asking questions about the sources of that information, the interests of its producers, and the ways in which it represents the world; and understanding how these technological developments are related to broader social, political and economic forces”.

There has of course been much more recent scholarship on the subject (see for example Pegrum, 2019, and the burgeoning field of higher education studies), but for the most part the work tends to go back to the definition of digital literacies as skills/competencies, and avoid the critical component altogether. I believe that there is a need to consider the skills and competencies that are required, but I must confess that I am far more interested in the critical approach. I think it is possible and necessary to consider both as we move into online educational spaces.

REFERENCES

Buckingham, D. (2006). Defining digital literacy – what do young people need to know about digital media? Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, Volume 1.

Friesen, N. (2010). Ethics and the technologies of empire: e-learning and the US military. AI & society, 25(1), 71-81.

Fuchs, C. (2013). Social media as participatory culture. Chapter 3 in Social media: A critical introduction. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE. Pp. 52-66.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2012). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. Chapter 4 in M.G. Durham & D. Kellner (Eds.). Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (2nd ed.). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, 53-74.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, bloggers, and gamers: Exploring participatory culture. NYU Press.

Pegrum, M. (2019). Digital Literacies as Lenses. In Mobile Lenses on Learning (pp. 249-274). Springer, Singapore.

Scholz, T. (2013). Digital labor: The internet as playground and factory. New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.

Smythe, D.W. (2012). On the audience commodity and its work. Chapter 16 in M.G. Durham & D. Kellner (Eds.). Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (2nd ed.). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, 185-203.