Digital literacy: what it is, characteristics, and what it is for

Digital literacy is an important concept to understand the reality of how fucking all the segments of society are able to cope well with the use of electronic devices connected to Internet.

In this article we will explore this concept of digital literacy and we will see what elements compose it and how it is related to the detection of false information on the network.

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What is digital literacy?

Digital literacy is defined as the ability to access, manage, understand, integrate, communicate, evaluate and create information safely and appropriately through digital technologies. This means that it goes beyond the ability to use a cell phone or computer in a basic way.

To achieve the reading and writing of digital media at this time from multiple media such as television, computers, tablets and phones intelligent and through different forms such as written texts, graphics, infographics, audios, videos, hypertexts or a combination of these, it is necessary to take into account that people require various learning concepts such as technology literacy, media literacy, multimedia literacy, or literacy computing.

This situation means that people who are not trained in Information and Communication Technology, in their work, educational, social and even world become an marginalized class of citizenship, and therefore have fewer possibilities to develop and function at all social levels and labor. This gap is much larger in poor countries and in sectors where the development of cities is much more advanced than in towns and rural areas., where you do not have the technological infrastructure or the knowledge.

In these last two years, deficits in digital literacy have taken center stage due to the consequences of overcrowding due to the COVID19 pandemic, since many activities of education and work had to be transferred to the virtual mode or telework, given the impossibility of traveling to educational centers and job sites in person. Although on the other hand it is undoubted that with the pandemic in full expansion it would have been impossible to think about the world without computing, without scenarios of telecommuting, without online schools or apps to reduce the impact of lack of education or work for people who have access to the digital technology.

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Digital competence and computer competence

It is necessary to make a differentiation to achieve digital literacy and to know the role of training in the functioning of society. On the one hand, it is required to have basic knowledge such as knowing how to use email, the spreadsheet or a text editor, which make up knowledge called "digital competence" (Digital Literacy) and they are basic in the 21st century, but not enough for a competitive society like the current one, particularly in certain professions.

On the other hand, in each profession one type of problem is solved, and most problems admit many ways to be solved, but not all solutions can be implemented in a computer. It is necessary to take into account that more emphasis should be placed on the computer science knowledge (hardware, networks, databases, programming, applications) necessary to develop these ideas. This double vision (way of thinking and knowledge of the basics of computing) is often called “computing competence”.

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What is the importance of digital literacy today?

The lack of digital literacy has been described as an element that has affected communication in the context of recent phenomena such as fake news of vaccines for COVID 19 and the 2020 presidential elections in the United States.

In fact, there are several studies that indicate the existence of factors that could indicate a relationship between digital illiteracy and the tendency to share unreliable information on the networks social.

From the deficit theory, it is considered that the people who can fall into "hoaxes" and false information are those who do not have a sufficient level of knowledge to distinguish between true information and false information. In this dimension, it is also important to consider the possible absence of scientific literacy and media literacy.

One of the main reasons older adults might believe fake news is that older adults may be less literate digital, scientific and media, which could make it difficult for people to identify content with false information, such as images that have been edited. It could be considered that an increase in digital literacy could help reduce fake news headlines.

Another theory states that people they may believe false information that is assimilated to their pre-existing beliefs or worldview. In the same way, an excessive belief in self-knowledge (seeing it as superior to the rest) and the tendency to receptivity to pseudo-deep content (that is, content that has a high number of words that may not have any particular meaning in a sentence) can predispose people to believe the news false.

In this way, these people could have Difficulties in identifying lack of precision in the content they find in the information on social networks, which makes it "fit" into all kinds of belief systems.

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A lower predisposition to spread "hoaxes" online?

It has been thought for some time that social media users with a low level of digital literacy may be more likely to be misled by virtual disinformation. Nevertheless, the fact of being someone digitally literate does not necessarily imply that that person is interested in sharing truthful information on social networks, revealing that there is a disconnect between truthful information and the intentions to disseminate content on the networks.

In the study conducted by Sirlin and his collaborators at MIT in 2020, two measures were used to measure the relationship between digital literacy and the tendency to share truthful information in networks.

The first measure of digital literacy is based on the traditional definition of this concept, which focuses on have basic digital skills required to successfully find information on the Internet. To measure it, a questionnaire was used with questions referring to Internet terms and attitudes towards technology.

A second questionnaire focused directly on social media literacy, and measures this construct by starting from questions in which users are questioned about the information they decide to share on the networks social. This methodology would identify people's susceptibility to fake news on social media: if a person is not able to identify that there are no editorial standards for sharing information in the social networks, there would be a lower level of skepticism regarding the quality of the information shared in the networks.

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Research findings

The first conclusion of the study indicates that a higher level of digital literacy enables people to have greater discernment against false and true information. It was found that there is a correlation between being familiar with the Internet and being able to understand the Facebook news algorithm. The size of this correlation is also comparable to the correlation found with procedural news knowledge and analytical thinking.

A second finding allowed us to observe that the most digitally literate network users have no greater discernment of true and false news. Nor is there an important correlation between familiarity and knowledge of the Internet with procedural knowledge of the news or with analytical thinking, A situation that may be curious because an important relationship has usually been found between analytical thinking and the discernment of fake news in the world virtual.

A third finding of this study focused on observing whether the political ideology of the participants (republican or Democrat, for the case of this study) can determine the tendency to believe and share false information in the world virtual. It was possible to identify that there is no evidence to justify a relationship between affiliation to an ideology concrete policy and the discernment of truthful information or the ability to choose truthful information on the networks social.

Although it was not observed that developing digital literacy guarantees greater discernment about what to share on social networks, this contrasts with the usefulness of procedural knowledge of the news, which is acquired through practice, and which is positively related to the ability to identify false information in virtual media and with the intentions of sharing true information.

This fact would allow us to conclude that it is preferable to focus on educational interventions in which the development of procedural knowledge of news, which would develop through practice and is not necessarily acquired consciously, beyond digital literacy. to prevent the proliferation of false information on the networks.

This could imply that although the development of digital literacy it is necessary in contexts in which technology is needed to guarantee better living conditions For people, it is also essential to complement this work with education to discern between true and false information in times in which the lack of information can end up affecting people to a greater extent, more in contexts such as the pandemic of the coronavirus, in which people can be oriented to make decisions that directly affect health due to the presence of a bias informative.