Critical Digital Literacies Across Scales and Beneath the Screen

• In Event: 63.083 - Humanizing Digital Literacies: Tracing the "Human" Affect and Effect in Digital Texts and Tools

Abstract

PURPOSE

Digital literacies, understood here broadly as semiotic activity in electronic forums, engender challenges for both researchers and participants when assessing context, position, and intention. In a “post-truth” era, investigating the ways that identity, recognition of humanity and human rights, and knowledge are shaped by digital tools and processes is paramount. Despite multiple versions of “digital literacies” (Stornaiuolo & Nichols, in preparation), including a growing body of work documenting agentive uses of multimodal tools (e.g., Pandya, Pagdalao, & Kim, 2015), and critiques of how digital literacies have been commercialized and co-opted to serve corporate interests (e.g., Spring, 2015), there is little work tracing linkages between the interests and ideologies of stakeholders and the shaping of digital participants’ experiences, including possibilities for interruptions of or reinscriptions of power.

PERSPECTIVE

Lynch (2017) argues that researchers in the field have focused on digital technologies as tools to the exclusion of the ways they operate at other scales of activity; namely, as linguistic constructs operating beneath the interface or screen (p.92). The “executability” of software (Williamson, 2015) means that distant interests or ideologies can be enacted across networks. These software can reflect distant interests, which can “govern and shape learners’ actions, thoughts, conduct, and subjectivities” (Williamson, 2015, p.101). This can be understood as a form of “disembedding” (Street, 2003; 2004), an interruption of interactions in the particularities of local spaces.

METHOD

This work engages a scalar approach (Stornaiuolo & LeBlanc, 2016; Stornaiuolo, Smith, & Phillips, 2016; Pandya, 2011) to illuminate ways the subscreenic can not only determine the possible courses of action for participants in digital interactions, but also embody interests and desires (e.g., commercialization, surveillance) both distant and hidden from the participant. Scalar analysis is used to explore mobilities and linkages between ideologies and interests in software-powered pedagogical and “risk assessment” tools.

FINDINGS

This paper offers examples of the ways that digital participants’ agency is outsourced to algorithms in two domains: educational spaces driven by “personalized” pedagogical tools and testing regimes, and the U.S. justice system. In each, ideologies and interests are encoded in software-powered enactments that shape possibilities for action and interaction, restricting recognition of humanity of those impacted. The scalar analysis traces the ways that racial ideologies are naturalized through the U.S. justice system’s “risk assessment” tools, and explores how notions of the ideal learner are enacted through software-driven learning tools that reflect the interests of stakeholders in the current educational reform movement.

SCHOLARLY SIGNIFICANCE

To engage critical digital literacies in this era requires an awareness of the grammar of these literacies, which necessarily involves software space. Democratizing evidence and working for all people to be recognized as human requires engagement with our contemporary ecologies of digital interaction. This means far more than competence with a set of tools; it requires critical awareness of the affect-- the scales of human activity that shape digital participants’ use of tools and practices, including those taking place beneath the screen.

Author

• Noah Asher Golden, California State University - Long Beach