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Concept
Digital literacy
Summary
Digital literacy is an individual's ability to find, evaluate, and communicate information by utilizing typing or digital media platforms. It is a combination of both technical and cognitive abilities in using information and communication technologies to create, evaluate, and share information.
While digital literacy initially focused on digital skills and stand-alone computers, the advent of the internet and the use of social media has resulted in a shift in some of its focus to mobile devices. Similar to other evolving definitions of literacy that recognize the cultural and historical ways of making meaning, digital literacy does not replace traditional methods of interpreting information, but rather extends the foundational skills of these traditional literacies. Digital literacy should be considered a part of the path towards acquiring knowledge.
Research into digital literacies has fallen along tracks of information literacy. This draws from traditions of information literacy and research into media literacy which rely on socio-cognitive traditions as well as research into multimodal composition which rely on anthropological methodologies. Digital literacy is built on the expanding role of social science research in the field of literacy as well as on concepts of visual literacy, computer literacy, and information literacy. The concept has evolved throughout the 20th and into the 21st century from a technical definition of skills and competencies to a broader comprehension of interacting with digital technologies.
Digital literacy is often discussed in the context of its precursor, media literacy. Media literacy education began in the United Kingdom and the United States as a result of war propaganda in the 1930s and the rise of advertising in the 1960s, respectively. Manipulative messaging and the increase in various forms of media further concerned educators. Educators began to promote media literacy education to teach individuals how to judge and assess the media messages they were receiving.
Official source
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