Which part of ‘digital literacy’ is important?

It’s my intention for this book to be as non-technical and non-specialist as possible. At the same time, however, I don’t want to make unjustified conceptual leaps without explaining them. You can probably safely skip this section (and Chapter 3) and still make sense of the rest of the book.

Jargon is language defined explicitly in relation to a particular activity. We come across it every day. Jargon is a normal part of human life. Sometimes it takes the form of an acronym, sometimes the foreshortening of a word, and on occasion is expressed as euphemism. The most important use of jargon, however, is when it helps explain something in one word or phrase that would otherwise take a paragraph or two.

It is with that in mind that I introduce you to the following jargon term. ‘Zeugmas’ are figures of speech that join two or more parts of a sentence into a single noun or verb. These figures of speech, these zeugmas, involve the omission of words and leave the reader (or listener) to fill in the gaps.

As soon as we add a modifier to literacy — ‘visual literacy’ or ‘information literacy’ or ‘digital literacy’ — we’re in the realm of zeugmas. We’ll consider ambiguity in more depth in the next chapter, but for now it’s enough to note that there’s a lack of clarity in using such terms without further explanation. Is the emphasis upon the ‘digital’ aspect of ‘digital literacy’? (making it a prozeugma) Or is the emphasis upon ‘literacy’? (making it a hypozeugma). Which is the adjective and who gets to decide?

We saw earlier in this chapter that literacy is already a problematic term. Therefore, adding a modifier (e.g. digital literacy) not only adds another layer of ambiguity, but raises the question of the relationship between the two words. We’re unsure as to how the modifying word does its modifying. We’re also unsure as to whether the modifying word is more important than the word it’s modifying. We’ll explore this ambiguity in more depth in the next chapter.