Critical
The seventh essential element of digital literacies, Critical, is about analysing the power structures and assumptions behind literacy practices. Communication in the online, digital world is markedly different from the offline, analogue world. Literacy practices in the latter centre mainly around the written text. If reading and writing is about encoding and decoding texts, then in the offline world, books, manuscripts and documents constitute these texts.
Online, however, ‘texts’ are encoded and decoded that are very different from books, manuscripts and documents. The simplest, but probably most profound change is with hyperlinked documents. These take a notion familiar from the offline world and add an important twist. Hyperlinks allow documents to be non-linear. They allow the reader to be in control of the structure of what they read. An example is in this very book, which includes hyperlinked footnotes you can follow if reading on a device connected to the internet.
In addition, multimedia objects such as videos can be texts. Audio can be a text. Anything that encodes experiences in a way that is packaged up and communicated to another can be a ‘text’. Just as there are different approaches to reading works such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, so there are different ways of reading every text. There is a surface-level understanding of the narrative format, and then layers and layers of meaning. 1
The Critical element is the closest digital literacies it comes to conception of ‘Media Literacy’. Relevant questions here are those such as: who is the audience? who is included? who is excluded? what are the assumptions behind this text? and so on. In order to develop this element of digital literacies, many approaches can be used.
The most basic, ‘crap-detection’ techniques may involve demonstrating indicators of trustworthiness and security online. This may involve exploring the different types of top-level domains (TLDs) such as .com, .edu, .ac.uk, etc. It may also include the difference between http and https — or what ‘the little padlock’ means when shopping online.
Becoming more advanced in the Critical element of digital literacies involves thinking about your own literacy practices. It involves reflecting on how they have come about, what has influenced you, and how your actions affect others.
It concerns the way that you structure texts yourself, as well as the techniques by which you deconstruct other texts. This is important offline as well as online, but many more (and different kinds of) texts are available in the digital world.
1. See Chapter 2 for more on the denotative/connotative divide. ↩
2. When I used to teach History, this was easy to build into lessons. For example, I used to show the execution of Charles I from the perspective of an eyewitness, the films Cromwell (1970) and To Kill a King (2003), along with an episode of The Simpsons and Blackadder. This kind of ‘multi-perspectivity’ helps to develop a critical reading of texts. ↩