The Trickster’s Guide to Digital Literacy: Memory, Manipulation, and Meaning-Making

• In Event: From Digital Tricksters to Social Media: Rethinking Information Technology in the Post-Soviet Space

Abstract

This paper explores the trickster archetype’s evolving role in the digital age, where social media, AI-generated content, and online influencers have become new arenas for deception, disruption, and reinvention, and then considers what opportunities the trickster archetype provides us when seeking to develop students’ digital and media literacy skills. Trickster figures, long present in folklore and mythology, are known for their paradoxical nature—embodying cleverness and foolishness, cruelty and kindness, deception and self-deception. Central to their power is their engagement with memory, serving simultaneously as disruptors and preservers of cultural, historical, and personal narratives. In the digital sphere, tricksterism manifests in the blurring of truth and fiction, the manipulation of cognitive biases, and the reshaping of public discourse. However, rather than merely destabilizing knowledge, tricksters also illuminate the skills necessary for digital literacy—adaptability, critical thinking, active listening, perspective-taking, and playfulness. This paper maps the presence of tricksters’ in digital culture, analyzing how their tactics shape memory and influence opinion as much as they offer strategies for navigating an era of algorithmic deception and information flux.

Author

• Kelly Knickmeier Cummings