The capacity to understand and control one’s personal data is now a crucial part of living in contemporary society. In this sense, traditional concerns over supporting the development of ‘digital literacy’ are now being usurped by concerns over citizens’ ‘data literacies’. In contrast to recent data safety and data science approaches, this article argues for a more critical form of ‘personal data literacies’ where digital data are understood as socially situated and context dependent. Drawing on the critical literacies tradition, the article outlines a range of salient socio-technical understandings of personal data generation and processing. Specifically, the article proposes a framework of ‘Personal Data Literacies’ that distinguishes five significant domains: (1) Data Identification, (2) Data Understandings, (3) Data Reflexivity, (4) Data Uses, and (5) Data Tactics. The article concludes by outlining the implications of this framework for future education and research around the area of individuals’ understandings of personal data.
Young people's engagements with social media now generate large quantities of personal data, with "big social data" becoming an increasingly important "currency" in the digital economy. While using social media platforms is ostensibly "free," users nevertheless "pay" for these services through their personal data-enabling advertisers, content developers, and other third parties to profile, predict, and position individuals. Such developments have prompted calls for social media users to adopt more informed and critical stances toward how and why their data are being used-that is, to build "critical data literacies." This article reports on research that explores young social media users' understandings of their personal data and its attendant issues. Drawing on research with groups of young people (aged 13-17 years), the article investigates the consequences of making third party (re)uses of personal data openly available for social media users to interpret and make critical sense of. The findings provide valuable insights into young people's understandings of the technical, social, and cultural issues that underpin their ability to engage with, and make sense of, social media data. The article concludes by considering how research into critical data literacies might connect in more meaningful and effective ways with everyday lived experiences of social media use.
Many scholars across the world have studied the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed to use digital media. Yet as digital texts have proliferated and evolved, there has been much conjecture over what it means to be ‘digitally literate’. As literacy researchers from Australia, Sweden and Argentina we are concerned with the drive to standardise definitions of ‘digital literacy’ despite notable differences in the cultural politics of education in each country. This paper analyses how the term digital literacy has been conceptualised and applied by scholars in these three language contexts. To do this, we analyse the most cited publications on digital literacy in the English-speaking; Scandinavian; and Spanish-speaking contexts. In the analysis the variety of definitions across and within each context, the key tensions and challenges that emerge and the implications for digital literacy education are explored. Our findings reveal that similar tensions and challenges exist in all three contexts, however, the path to resolution varies given contextual differences. The article concludes with suggestions for educational research that acknowledges and advocates the need for local conceptualisations of digital literacies in increasingly globalised educational systems.
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