KL: Ramón Reichert: Emerging Topics in the Study of Culture: Introducing Digital Literacy

The term literacy has become a ubiquitous metaphor in recent years, particularly in connection with digital technologies. Literacies remain an attractive option to describe the use of new communication technologies and different communication modes for the production of medially-mediated utterances. This lecture gives an overview of the theories and methods of the new literacy studies and shows in this context their critical potentials and the latest developments in the research field of the digital literacies. Digital literacy involves an understanding how search engines function, how hypertexts and links are structured to encourage us to navigate in particular ways, how information is gathered about users, and how the activity of users is governed and constrained by technological and commercial forces. Digital Literacies develop a theoretical framework of their own owing to the media specificity of digital media culture. In another sense digital literacies focus on technological application competencies when it comes to using convergent media. Finally, i would like to point out that the idea of digital literacy is not only as a question of technological transformation but also as a question of social practices.

// Prof. Dr. Ramòn Reichert (University of Vienna, Austria)