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Civic and Material Dimensions of Critical Digital Literacies

Sun, April 7, 11:50am to 1:20pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: Second Floor, City Hall - Working Group

Abstract

This paper analyzes the role of digital literacies in civic life within an emerging platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017). In light of the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., it is clear the “digital” has shaped (and potentially remade) how individuals interpret, produce, and make meaning of their civic and public life. Participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006b) is shaped in democratic, distributed ways but also through opaque and even anti-democratic forces, discourses, and ideologies embedded in multiple levels of digital communication. From the acknowledged substantial shortcomings of media literacy (e.g. boyd, 2018) to the role of algorithms and bots in remediating the fabric of digital interactions (Noble, 2018b) and software platforms like Facebook in everyday civic and economic life, approaches to critical digital literacies must reconcile with how capitalism, partisanship, and interlocking forms of oppression affect civic digital life.

We draw on critical theories of spatiality and materiality in literacies (Leander & Boldt, 2013; Luke, 2004; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010) in order to explore civic dimensions of literacies across multiple data sets and within software. While “design” has been envisioned as central to multiliteracies, we approach it as a problematic object (Suchman, 2011) that is “always-already” imbued with power relations and thus politics (Foucault, 1980).

Looking at data of young people’s interactions and multimodal productions across time and space in digital and non-digital contexts, our multimodal discourse analysis focuses on relational components that drive how civic imagination is constructed along with the role of empathy, power, and dialogue. The data include ethnographic observations, interviews, and analysis of multimodal artifacts produced by young people in two informal learning environments.

We discuss how platforms for interaction – online social networks, classroom spaces adhering to schooling policies, informal learning environments – privilege specific kinds of interactions and shape the experiences of interlocutors. Literacy practices are shaped within communities as well as by the digital tools that mediate interactions. Critical literacies among teachers, students, and researchers need to push beyond linguistics/semiotics elements and understand underlying designs, envisioned “user experience” and ways they are embedded in normative and shifting power relations. Literacy (and learning) needs to be contextualized in local manifestations of global processes as experienced by the members of a community, within a consolidating and volatile neo-liberal global order, mediated by digital and analog platforms increasingly integrated into neoliberal platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017). Recognizing that digital literacies are inherently tied to audiences, interactions, and broader social engagement, this paper underscores the role of civics within the study of critical digital literacies. While digital tools have democratized and opened up lines of communication and inquiry, civic digital life has simultaneously become more authoritarian and opaque. This paper looks across this spectrum for pedagogic possibilities.

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