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After two long weeks talking and reflecting upon digital literacy and residents-visitors metaphor [1], a question comes to my mind: is there any advantage to be resident to survive in the era of digital literacy? or, is it enough to be a visitor to merely survive?

The term digital literacy, coined by Paul Gilster, refers to “the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide variety of sources when it is presented via computers” [3]. From this definition, it emerges that there exist specific skills that need to be developed to deal with digital literacy, compared to the ones requested for information literacy. Among these skills there is the ability to find information, that in digital literacy becomes the ability to choose resources, to communicate information and to store/delete information [2].

So, it seems that the use of hardware and software tools, that Shapiro and Hughes call tool literacy [4], is important to benefit from digital literacy.

In the residents-visitors metaphor proposed by White and Le Cornu [1], people using the web can be distinguished according to their engagement. The visitors are those who use some tools to accomplish a precise task, but their activity is not visible to the others. In other words, visitors do not broadcast their identity on the Web.

The residents are those who think that “the Web is a place to express opinions, a place in which relationships can be formed and extended” [1]. This also means that residents do not use the web merely to accomplish a task but also to express an identity (“a blog post is as much an expression of identity as it is a discussion of particular ideas” to cite [1]).

In the era of digital literacy, communication is an important component of information [5]. This implies that communication material, such as emails, messages, blogs, etc. are part of the information (the content) itself.

From this perspective, it seems that residents benefit from the Web more than visitors do with respect to digital literacy. This is due to two reasons: 1) residents are used to share their opinions on the Web, that is they create content of information that others can use; 2) residents are known on the Web, since they share their identity. So, their posts, blogs, mailing lists, have more chance to become visible to the community and, as such, used.

Visitors can use these communication artefacts as source of information, but they do not contribute to create new information since they are not interested to share their thoughts.

Does it answer my initial questions? Please, share your thoughts!

References
 1 White, D.S. and Le Cornu, A. Visitors and residents: a new typology for online engagement. First Monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171
 2 David Bawden, Origins and concepts of digital literacy, Sociology, 2008
 3 Gilster, P.Digital Literacy, New York: Wiley, 1997
 4 Shapiro, J.J, Hughes, S.K. Information technology as a liberal art. Educom Review, 31(2), March/April 1996.
 5 Gilster, P. Digital fusion: defining the intersection of content and communications. A. Martin & D. Madigan (Eds.), Digital literacies for learning (pp.42-50). London: Facet Publishing
Residents and visitors in the era of digital literacy