Acquiring a digital looser identity – and how to loose it during ONL

Discourses represent the world from a particular perspectives and shape how we can talk about a topic, for example digital literacy, and what kind of meaning we attach to the phenomenon. Discourses, thus, influence the way we construct our identities in powerful ways (Fairclough, 2003). Regardless of knowing all this, I had never really reflected upon how I had come to assume an identity of what Prensky (2001) calls digital immigrant, the one who can adjust/cope in digital environments but never quite hack it, always having at least one foot in the past. Born in the 1960’s where the internet was nowhere in sight during my school days, nor in my university days and not really even during my PhD studies. There was no google scholar. I was forced to physically visit different libraries and grind bookshelves in the basement in order to find the article I wanted. The first net based digital tools, the email and sms-messages, had just been invented, and I was eagerly using them, and have ever since been actively putting myself in situations where I have been compelled to learn more. Is that motivation, I wonder, or a survival strategy in this digital society of ours that seems to change quicker and quicker making us run faster and faster. Even though I have been fairly active in gaining new net-based skills, I have always had a degree of uncomfortableness with technology, thus the discourses of digi natives and immigrants has fallen in a fertile ground. I have constructed an identity of a digital looser in regard of digi natives like my daughter who in the age of eleven did little coding and set up her own blog for her digital photographs.

Seeing the videos and webinar of David White and reading the article of White and Cornu (2011) made me re-consider how big a looser am I after all. In their article White and Cornu (2011) challenge the distinction between digi natives and digi immigrants and suggest that it would be more fruitful to talk about visitors and residents and even more importantly that most of us operate in both modes depending on the situation and digital tools we are using. These two ways to use the web opens up another axes; personal and institutional use (see Picture 1). When operating in the visitor mode we use the Web for a defined purpose, for example I use google for searching recipes for my personal fun and for searching articles for my research needs. People choosing to operate only in visitor mode are reluctant to leave social traces of themselves in the net in the form of personal profile or opinion but rather use the web as a tool. This was the way I used the web until 2010 when I set up my face book profile, and it has been downhill ever since 😊

I have become more and more a resident mainly through institutional use of the web in other words through my work practices. For residents, the web is a place to collaborate and have fun with colleagues and friends, a place of residence in the virtual world. Web is the site to construct digital identities, to leave a trace through sharing information and commenting. For residents there is not much difference on the content they produce and who they are as persons (White and Cornu, 2011). Not quite a resident yet, as for me there still is a difference between who I am and what I produce. I do not want them to merge.

After drawing a picture of my use of web in the Immigrant-Resident continuum (Picture 1) I realized that I am actually using the web a lot and leaving much more digital traces than I realized. I use zoom for meetings, lecturing and yoga with my colleagues. In Linkedin, I am leaving some traces but still operating in rather passive mode; I am using Facebook for keeping in contact with friends and family but also for marketing our programme, the seminars we have organized, and for participating in different work related digital communities. I am not a digital looser after all while still not fully resident either, but I would say that quite digitally literate after all.

Picture 1 My use of web in Immigrant-Resident continuum.

Being digitally literate was also an issue that I had not given much thought and it was a revelation how multifaceted issues it actually is. According to guide on Building Digital Literacies (2014) digital literacy consist of seven different elements. 1) Media literacy, 2) Communication and collaboration, 3) Career and identity management, 4) IT literacy, 5) Learning skills, 6) Digital scholarship and 7) Information literacy. Reflecting upon each aspects of digital literacy, I have realized that while my students might be more skilled than me, for example, in using different devices and software or in building digital careers they lack skills in many of the area where I am skilled like media literacy and information literacy. Thus, I feel that my task as an educator is not yet done. I still have a lot to give.

In the end of this blog post I want to discuss more about building careers and identity management. Building careers and managing your identity online is about constructing digital reputation (Building Digital Literacies, 2014). From the beginning of the ONL course this has been portrayed as one of the tasks of educators by the course lectures as well as the videos we have been instructed to watch; being actively out there in online sites, debating in twitter and writing blogposts for the world to see. The way this new task and identity is portrayed on the course creates a picture of an ideal academic who is in sync with changing times and modes of communication and learning. This creates normative pressure for participants to follow suit. All this is done in the name of openness and sharing; who would not want to contribute for open learning for all. I find this practice highly value laden and problematic. Firstly, it creates a new task for educators to which higher education institutions are not allocating any time for. This means that educators should be using their free time to build their online reputation. Secondly, encouraging academics to actively participate in using free applications like Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, Linkedin to build our professional reputation is directly contributing to increasing power of surveillance capitalism as they called in the in the Social Dilemma documentary. According to the documentary “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” The major IT companies like google, Fb ect. will own everything you produce, and they monitor all online activity on the sites. All our post, comments and likes are collected and used in crating models of our behavior in more and more advanced ways and in the end the model is predicting our behavior. These companies are master’s of psychological manipulation and universities, like Stanford University, has educated people in just that, to become better and better in creating addictive behaviors for online users. I, for example, can identify such addictive beahviours in myself and I am pretty sure that so can most of us. We no longer master the tools but they are mastering us (The Social Dilemma 2020). Are we creating a new generation of educators whose identity is tied to likes and number of followers? Should educational institutions be using and normalizing the use of these media platforms that are deliberately built on breach privacy and create addictive behaviors? Third, what is the trustworthiness of professional identities constructed online. We surely cannot assess it by the number of likes and followers. The professional identities built online can be a bit like some Tinder profiles, mainly fake news, but you realize it too late.  

References

Anon. (2014) Developing digital literacies. JISC guide. http://web.archive.org/web/20141011143516/http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/digital-literacies/, accessed 9^th Octorber, 2020.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

Marc Prensky, 2001, “Digital natives, digital immigrants,” On the Horizon, volume 9, number 5, at http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf, accessed 4^th Octorber, 2020.

White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).

Films

David White: Visitors and residents (part 1)

David White: Visitors and residents – Credibility (part 2)

The Social Dilemma, document by Exposure Labs (Netflix)