Digital Literacy and OA (Conference Proposal Drafting)

Mattie Bruton
Digital Literacy and OA
Digital literacy issues and open access issues are often depicted as rather distant from each other in the disciplinary geography of computers and writing. Digital literacy is often associated with issues of the cultural and the pedagogical while Open Access with technical and legal issues. But these two topics are actually connected by many of the same concerns and anxieties. Furthermore, the future of Open Access has powerful implications for the future of digital literacy.
In his influential 1991 essay “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis,” John Trimbur writes: “[T]he rhetorical power of the phrase ‘literacy crisis’ resides in its ability to condense a broad range of cultural, social, political, and economic tensions into one central image.” (Qtd in Lewis, “Introduction,” Strategic Discourse).  Since then, anxieties surrounding technology's effect on literacy practices  have continued to emerge, keeping pace with the rapid advancements of communication technologies. Often, as scholars such as Stacey Pigg have pointed out, such anxieties are often ill-grounded and sensationalist, connected more to shifting structures of power than to actual literacy concerns.
However, all concerns about the state of digital literacy are paranoid or unrealistic. Kathleen Blake Yancey points out that there are some rather unsettling implications to the way the circulation of information has changed in the wake of the digital revolution. She writes that information literacy practices have “gone from a formalized...system with human interpreters to an ecology constituted of the valuable and the incredible” in which “facts, data, personal narrative, rumors, information, and misinformation, all inhabiting the same sphere, each info bit circulating as though it carried the same value as all the others” (“Creating and Exploring New Worlds: Web 2.0, Information Literacy, and the Ways we Know,” 90).
When it comes to digital literacy, the implications for accessibility are clear: populations with less access to technology will not develop digital literacy skills, or may develop them more slowly.  Therefore, they may be more susceptible to trusting digital information which is biased, manipulative, or otherwise unreliable. As Kevin Brooks and Chris Lindgren point out “the digital divide is materially more than access to technology, and that culture is embedded in the design and appropriation of technology” (“Responding to the Proceduracy Crisis: from Code Year to Code Decade).
Advocating for Open Access is one way to promote digital literacy. As it stands, data algorithms are almost always black boxes. We know that our data is being used to determine what we see and do not see online, but we don’t get to know how that data is being used. Estee Beck argues that it is “up to educators” to mold students who are aware of, and can perhaps “subvert” these practices (“Sustaining Critical Literacies in the Information Age,” 38). Beck writes “If users are unaware of this type of algorithmic persuasion occurrence in Facebook and in other websites, information literacies efforts led by librarians, for example, become hindered.”
Assuming digital epistemologies continue on their current trajectories, the data algorithms which govern our experience of the web will only grow more complex and further from the technical comprehension of the average person. The students we teach will have less and less familiarity with the means by which information is brought to them; we will have less and less familiarity with the means by which information is brought to our students. Advocating for Open Access and data transparency is one way to attempt to combat the worrying forces of “post truth” and get everyone on the “same page” about information literacy.



Beck, Estee.  “Sustaining Critical Literacies in the Digital Information Age: the Rhetoric
of Sharing, Prosumerism, and Digital Algorithmic Surveillance,” Social Writings/Social Media: Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies, edited by Douglas M. Walls and Stephanie Vie, WAC Clearinghouse, 2017, pp. 38-51. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/social/

Brooks, Kevin and Chris Lindgren. “Responding to the Proceduary Crisis: From Code Year to
Code Decade.” Strategic Discourse, the Politics of the New Literacy Crisis, edited by Lynn Lewis, Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2015. https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/strategic/

Lewis, Lynn C. “Introduction.” Strategic Discourse, the Politics of the New Literacy Crisis, edited
by Lynn Lewis, Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2015. https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/strategic/.

Pigg, Stacey. “Distracted by Digital Writing: Unruly Bodies and the Schooling of Digital Literacy.”
Strategic Discourse, the Politics of the New Literacy Crisis, edited by Lynn Lewis, Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2015. https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/strategic/

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