I was born where internet was not yet the big think it is now. But definitely I grew up with computers all around.
From the beginning on my parents thought me be careful with my data in the internet. I am still today. I do not really post about my personal life and keep personal and professional life separate. As you have probably read in the first post I am a media artist so professionally I do share my work.
As I am only at the beginning of my academic educator. But of course I have used digital tools during my studies.
So the topic of digital literacy is important. Especially as there is so much information available and not all is important or even true [1]. The model of grouping internet users into groups of different ages is not accurate nor true anymore. One could propose a model of visitor and resident [2], but also this model is not perfect.
The model of traditional and digital tools and media holds up pretty well even today. As one can see the internet as just another tool for a certain purpose. In the past one published a blog article like this in a newspaper.
For this one had to know how to write it and whom to send it to. Same holds true for the digital part only the way how you publish and write it has to learned from ground up as it is based on a different paradigms as we used to have in the analog world.
Most important to the digital tools as well as the analog ones is why you want to use them or the goal you want to achieve. These goals can be very different from person to person and one could spend a long time in trying to generalize them.
People that have thought them self how to use a certain tool will be very quick in using it. Often it seems that the digital tools are easier to learn, but it is more about convenience.
You can get a digital tool very fast compared to a analog one. You could go into a shop to buy paper and a pen to write something down or you just start almost any digital device in your home and start writing right away.
When it comes to searching useful information for a project it is more convenient to go online and use a search engine instead of going to the library and search the right book.
But these require different kind of skill sets. In the library you can be quite sure that the information you are getting is from a known and often also trusted source. Digital information rises the question of trust in the source and this question has to solved by you and not the librarian.
Also another aspect is privacy and data security. In the internet it is easy to hide behind a name. When you say your address to your friend from person to person you know what information you gave a very specific person. In the internet you don’t see most often the person or know what kind of data you are giving them.
But there are also habits and methods of coming by these problems. There is a reason why we still trust in peer-reviewed data for example in papers or newspapers. One could also argue clicking ok on every cookie notice and terms of service without reading them is easy, but on the other hand would you still click ok so easily if it was a written contract?
So what it comes down to in the end is purpose and convenience. Why do we want to use this tool and what is the tradeoff between convenience and data security we want to make.
References:
- [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thorsten-Quandt/publication/332749986_Fake_News/links/5ce64720a6fdccc9ddc70bd2/Fake-News.pdf
- [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI
