Digital Illiteracy

While nobody needed a computer or a mobile phone to get around just two decades ago, we have progressed into the digital age, where technology borders every aspect of our lives. However, the world is at a point where we are on the verge of creating a divide between the literate and the illiterate – both in the literal and digital sense.

The world is moving into the age of automation, especially in first-world countries. For instance, bank tellers have been progressively replaced by internet banking, while at popular food chains such as McDonald’s, we see fewer staff and more automated ordering kiosks. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, governments in some countries have been making use of mobile applications to control the volume of crowds in any location at a given time.

It is definitely much more efficient to automate these processes because it generally makes queues go faster, is cheaper than hiring more staff, and creates fewer opportunities for incidents, complaints or lack of quality control. After a while, human-computer interaction becomes commonplace. Many who grew up in the digital age can adapt easily to the intuitive user interfaces, and automation achieves its purpose of making life more convenient for everyone. Overall, automating customer-to-business interaction is more efficient – except when the digitally illiterate come into the picture.

The lack of ability and skills to create, evaluate, learn, and find information on online media and digital platforms through the usage of technology is called Digital Illiteracy.

The term digital illiteracy emanated from the two words “Digital” and “Illiteracy”. 

The word Digital refers to the electronic technology that expresses data or information (signals) in terms of two states known as digits. In a nutshell, any use of data or information in the form of digits for communication in the world is referred to as digital.

Similarly, according to Merriam Webster’s Dictionary, the word illiteracy refers to the inability to read and write. However, according to Asebiomo (2014), illiteracy can refer not only to the inability to read and write but also to a lack of knowledge and understanding in a particular subject area.

Under this context, digital illiteracy can be defined as the lack of knowledge and understanding of using digital technology to locate, organize, evaluate, and create data (information) for communication. 

On a serious note students who are digitally illiterate may soon find themselves at just as much of a disadvantage as those who cannot read or write. Digital illiteracy goes beyond the inability to use or operate the computer system to type and print documents. Somebody may know how to type and print documents with the computer system, yet be digitally illiterate. Digital illiteracy encompasses a wide range of inability to manipulate online data in order to achieve advancement in science, technology, commercial, and governance.