Abstract:

Internet literacy has been defined in hundreds of books and papers, and over the past thirty years there has been a steady shift of emphasis from an information skills approach to a broadly social constructivist perspective, one that recognises the importance of understanding the provenance and ideology associated with information available through the Internet (Pangrazio, 2016; Bauer & Ahooei, 2018; Aguilera and Pandya 2021). Drawing upon the theories of critical discourse analysis (Freire, 1970; Fairclough, 1989; Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000) this paper argues that in teaching critical Internet literacy, pedagogy should lead to both emancipation and action. Critical Digital Literacy (CDL) also raises issues of authority and epistemology. The Internet is making it ever clearer that it is powerless to prevent the Balkanisation of epistemology: instead of the collective wisdom of science becoming available to the whole world, what is happening is that belief systems are trumping data (Berners-Lee, 2018). On the Internet, beliefs about what is ‘true’ start with beliefs about which author, leader, or value-system you choose to believe, and this can build impermeable epistemological barriers between the microsystems of individual beliefs and the macrosystems of science or government. This paper will offer examples of CDL in action, analyzing segments from 5th grade, 9th grade and 10th grade UK students’ Internet searching strategies, looking particularly at the power relations implicit in the language and semiotics of Internet sources, and how these are reflected in students’ discourse. Four levels of increasing criticality are identified: Ingenuous, Multimodal, Circumspect, and Ambivalent, with the most sophisticated ‘ambivalent’ level reflecting the critical literacy contention that ‘truth’ is a contested concept (Gray, 1977), a social construct that is often understood only within a local belief system. The pedagogical and epistemological imperatives that follow from this position may be orthogonal to those of the educational system within which students and teachers are operating, and indeed may reveal that the last thing governments want is for students to determine for themselves what is, or is not, ‘true’.

References:
[1] Aguilera, E., & Pandya, J. Z. (2021). Critical literacies in a digital age: current and future issues. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 16(2), 103-110.
[2] Berners-Lee, T., 2018. The web is under threat. Join us and fight for it. https://webfoundation.org/2018/03/web-birthday-29/. Retrieved 8 February 2022.
[3] Bauer, A. T., & Ahooei, E. M. (2018). Rearticulating Internet Literacy. Journal of Cyberspace Studies, 2(1), 29-53.
[4] Blommaert, J., & Bulcaen, C. (2000). Critical discourse analysis. Annual review of Anthropology, 447-466.
[5] Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power. London: Longman.
[6] Freire, P. (1970). The pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
[7] Gray, J.N. (1977) On the Contestability of Social and Political Concepts. Political Theory, Vol.5, No.3, pp. 331–348.
[8] Pangrazio, L. (2016) Reconceptualising critical digital literacy, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37:2, 163-174, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2014.942836

Keywords:

Digital literacy, critical literacy, critical Internet literacy, technology and learning.