Critical digital literacy comprises subsets of medium- and content-related skills necessary for digital privacy and digital citizenship. Frameworks for defining and evaluating digital literacy proliferate in academia and policymaking; however, in a networked climate subsumed by dataveillance, algorithmic bias, political bots, and deep fakes, these frameworks need to be updated. Algorithms may be the greatest determinant in sociopolitical online interactions and information gathering, and without a multivalent literacy of algorithms, nuanced understandings of digital privacy and digital citizenship may be unachievable. We therefore propose ‘algorithmic literacy’ become an essential element for digital literacy in young adult media education. Researchers have highlighted how intersectional aspects of gender, ability, and socioeconomic status are stronger predictors of low digital literacy than age. Following a tradition of participatory (rather than protectionist) research about youth privacy online, our research foregrounds young adults’ practices and perspectives on algorithmic culture in order to co-develop a framework for algorithmic literacy. Our paper shares findings from a participatory project co-designing an algorithmic literacy toolkit with young adults as co-researchers and participants. We created a curriculum focusing on reviewing the current critical scholarly literature, policy, and popular discourse on algorithms. After two weeks of intensive research, our student co-researchers met amongst themselves to devise a sustainable, ‘living-document’ type of toolkit, comprising a website, an Instagram page, and a Medium blog. Reflected in the toolkit's name, The Algorithmic You uses an intersectional lens to facilitate peer-oriented ‘self-discovery’ of how algorithms shape and produce interactions in the everyday lives of young adults.
My doctoral research focuses on the experiences of young people learning about and exploring the World Wide Web from Canadian homes, schools, libraries and community centres between 1994-2004. While there are many intersecting facets of my research that include federal policy interventions, public discourse in Canadian media, and oral interviews, I engage significantly with web archives in order to provide perspectives from young and marginalized people who were creating websites and community on the early web. My research has focused on GeoCities, one of the most popular web hosting platforms between 1996-1999.GeoCities users, called homesteaders, could build websites for free in different neighbourhoods that reflected interests and hobbies, like the WestHollywood (LGBTQ+) or EnchantedForest (Youth) neighbourhoods. When the platform was removed from the web in 2009, there were significant archival efforts to preserve the once-thriving online community in the Internet Archive. For researchers, this archive poses significant ethical, methodological and epistemological issues. Although it is a valuable resource for researching a history of the online communities on the early web, it also creates opportunities for harmful data practices while also calling into question individuals' "right to be forgotten" (EU, 2016b). This dispatch explores some ethical questions that have emerged through my research on digital experiences of young people throughout the 1990-2000s and the use of archived web materials created at that time by young people who were under the age of 18.
Purpose This paper aims to provide a brief overview of the ethical challenges facing researchers engaging with web archival materials and demonstrates a framework and method for conducting research with historical web data created by young people. Design/methodology/approach This paper’s methodology is informed by the conceptual framing of data materials in research on the “right to be forgotten” (Crossen-White, 2015; GDPR, 2018; Tsesis, 2014), data afterlives (Agostinho, 2019; Stevenson and Gehl, 2019; Sutherland, 2017), indigenous data sovereignty and governance (Wemigwans, 2018) and feminist ethics of care (Cifor et al., 2019; Cowan, 2020; Franzke et al., 2020; Luka and Millette, 2018). It demonstrates a new method called an archive promenade, which builds on the walkthrough and scroll-back methods (Light et al., 2018; Robards and Lincoln, 2017). Findings The archive promenades demonstrate how individual attachments to digital traces vary and are often unpredictable, which necessitates further steps to ensure that privacy and data sovereignty are maintained through research with web archives. Originality/value This paper demonstrates how the archive promenade methodological intervention can lead to better practices of care with sensitive web materials and brings together previous work on ethical fabrications (Markham, 2012), speculation (Luka and Millette, 2018) and thick context (Marzullo et al., 2018), to yield new insights for research on the experiences of growing up online.
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