How many Literacies can there be?

My grandma likes to treat the comment box on Facebook posts as an open forum.  A photo of my cousin riding a bike will elicit the comment “Did you get a job yet?”  A music video posted by my mom prompts the comment “Did you get those coupons I sent you?”  She doesn’t throw out such non sequiturs in normal conversation.  What’s going on here?  Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel might say she’s lacking in a certain digital literacy, specifically for social media.  Or does she just have a completely different digital literacy from me?

In the introduction to Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices, Lankshear and Knobel argue that there are many digital literacies.  The clearest dividing line is between functional and sociocultural literacies.  Grandma’s got the functionality down: she can boot up a computer, open an internet browser, log into Facebook, and type out a message.  The disconnect must be in the sociocultural realm.  As the editors argue, literacy is more than just encoding and decoding something.  That something must also be understood in its context.

The digital world provides many contexts.  Lankshear and Knobel give a non-exhaustive list of “blogs, video games, text messages, online social network pages, discussion forums, internet memes, FAQs, [and] online search results” (5).  Posting a plea for help to a veterinary advice forum about your cat’s sudden hair loss takes a different mindset from searching for funny photos of hairless cats.  The editors argue that there are not just different digital contexts, but different digital literacies.  They define literacies as “different ways of reading and writing and the ‘enculturations' that lead to becoming proficient in them” and state that, because we are all “apprenticed” more than one, we must speak of literacies, in the plural (7).

I can’t object to drawing a line between reading something and understanding it.  I’m also on board with the idea that we’re all interpreting media in wildly different contexts, with varying proficiencies.  I’m just not sure it necessarily follows that this constitutes different literacies.  Why isn’t just as valid to say that there is only one concept of digital literacy and we all use it in different contexts to different degrees?  Perhaps anticipating this question, Lankshear and Knobel chose for the first chapter of their collection a work by David Bawden called “Origins and Concepts of Digital Literacy.”  That’s literacy, singular.

Bawden builds up a definition of digital literacy from the fundamental ideas of literacy itself.  He gives an overview of the concept of “information literacy” as opposed to “computer literacy.”  While the latter is almost purely functional, information literacy involves “the evaluation of information, and an appreciation of the nature of information resources” (21).  These are broad concepts, but the division mirrors Lankshear and Knobel’s separation of functional and sociocultural literacies, applied specifically to the digital world.

In collecting components of definitions from different authors, Bawden can’t help but repeatedly note the definition offered by Paul Gilster: “digital literacy is about mastering ideas, not keystrokes.”  It is, Bawden says, “the current form of the traditional idea of literacy per se—the ability to read, write and otherwise deal with information using the technologies and formats of the time—and an essential life skill” (18). 

I can get behind “ideas, not keystrokes.”  It’s broad, but if one division matters most, it’s between functional and sociocultural literacies.  Grandma might be a smidge less digitally-literate than others, but if it’s an essential life skill, she’s doing alright.

Lankshear, Colin, and Michele Knobel, eds. Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.  New York: Peter Lang, 2008.