The topic for the last two weeks has been online
participation and digital literacies. I really like the idea that we should talk
about digital literacies in plural
because there are so many tools and you can be fluent in one and not in another.
We have talked a lot about David White’s (see e.g. White and Le Cornu (2011))
typology of Visitors and Residents on the web and that you can be a visitor in
one tool and a resident in another.
Personally, I am not very present online. I have a Facebook account, but I rarely post anything. For this course, I started this blog and a Twitter account (which has not yet been used). I look at Trip advisor to get ideas for restaurants etc, but I do not give reviews myself. I am very much a visitor on the web. White and Le Cornu (2011) discusses that a resident is not seen as “better” than a visitor, but that it is about your own choice, and your own motivation, what you want to be. For me that is an uplifting thought. The reason that I am not more present on the web is not that I am not capable to learn how to use a specific tool but that I enjoy just being a visitor in many of these tools. There was a Tweetchat event during this topic, and I followed it a little bit, but I didn’t post anything and I left early. I didn’t really see the point of this. I really felt like a visitor, but a visitor by choice. I really didn’t feel the urge to participate and I was very fine with that. It had nothing to do with inability, but just my choice.

I saw a TEDx talk by Doug Belshaw (2012) where he talked about memes and then I felt a bit like Liza in the TV series Younger. She is in her 40ies, but pretends to be 27 in order to get a job in publishing. She googles how to set up a twitter account, and what a meme is, because she doesn’t know. This TV series really starts off in the view of Prensky’s (2001) typology of digital natives and digital immigrants. It is then all about age. But Liza shows that it is not all about age. In the beginning, she is not even a visitor in some tools, and of course then the barrier can be large, but she is able to learn and becomes a resident because she wants to.
For me, so far, I am a to a large extent a visitor by choice, and I like that!
References:
White, D.
& Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online
engagement. First
Monday, 16(9), at https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049, accessed 30 September 2019.
Belshaw,
D. (2012) The essential elements of digital literacies: Doug Belshaw at
TEDxWarwick, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yQPoTcZ78, accessed
30 September 2019.
Prensky, M.
(2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On
the Horizon, vol 9, no. 5, at https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf, accessed 11 October 2019.