During the OpenNetworkedLearning course we have been examining the continuum between the digital visitors and residents supplemented by the continuum of personal versus institutional use of different technologies. In this text I will take a look at one of the most commonly discussed aspects: social media platforms.

My impression is that some of the leading motivations to move from digital visitor to digital resident is to be able to understand the digital platforms better, be able to give advice to students about the use of the platforms and conduct teaching using these platforms. However, I am under the impression that these aspects are much less correlated than they would appear at the first glance.

If a person actively uses social media platforms that does not imply that they are digitally literate about that platform. Large number of people who are deeply engrossed into social media platforms are doing that exactly because they are not fully aware of the potential consequences of oversharing their personal information. This can range from just giving material to psychics to baby adoption scams.

Some of the most digitally literate people completely avoid social media. A large number of people (TED Talk, The Guardian Article) are terminating their presence on social media to increase their free time, happiness, effectiveness at work and reduce depression. These are people who have reached digital resident status in public social media and it has started hurting them.

Both of the above cases challenge the connection between social media resident and digital literacy. The question opens up, if usage alone of social media does not result in digital literacy, what does?

I think that the answer to this question is much more complicated than one would expect. While there are some wonderful resources about social media (e.g. Reply to all), using social media will always present to the user only one side of the conversation. The responses of the majority of the readers are not heard by the writer and as such, the producer of the social media content cannot learn in the same way they can learn in a more typical social setting.