Assessment 1: Critical Reflection 1
In engaging with the lecture and reading for Week One, I was introduced to the concept of digital literacy—defined loosely as one’s proficiency in both consuming and creating digital media. Our reading highlights the issue of literacy in the Modern Era by examining similar circumstances surrounding print media in the 1950s, and the pioneering work of academic Richard Hoggart.
Whereas critics before Hoggart claimed absolute authority over what is culturally valuable, Hoggart instead believed that working-class popular values were a valid source of such cultural judgements, and dedicated his academic work to providing the masses with a framework by which popular culture could ‘self-correct’. This contrasted with the views of contemporary intellectuals, who saw popular culture as open to manipulation to the point of being ‘fascist’, while also conceding to their view of it as something which needs to be ‘corrected’ from the outside. While I disagree which those intellectuals’ condescending views of popular culture as inferior, I can also understand the historical context of such beliefs—having just emerged from the dictatorships of World War II, the world now found itself coming to terms with the advent of telecommunications and the rise of popular culture as a major socio-political force.
Using Hoggart’s work in the 1950s as a case study, Hartley argues that with the advent of digital culture, critics can no longer detach themselves from popular culture to critique it from the outside. In the era of digital communication, ordinary people must be recognised as equally important nodes of cultural exchange, who are not pawns of commercial and corporate forces (as academics have cynically described them), but instead regularly disrupt traditional forms of one-to-many communications by acting as both producers and consumers of information. Instead of opposing digital literacy as an extension of populism, and educating people on ‘how to make the least’ of digital media, Hartley advocates that ordinary people should instead be made digitally literate to the point of being able to serve as independent critical agents (2009, pp. 1–38).
Throughout this reading, I was struck by the overarching theme of an intellectual divide which supposedly exists between “high culture” academics and “popular culture” masses—whereas Hoggart made efforts to bridge this divide by eroding the authority of academic elites and granting agency to popular culture, it was also worth noting that many of his contemporaries revelled in their ivory towers of intellectualism. I find this particularly relevant in the context of today’s current socio-political discourse: there is much discussion of the resurgence of anti-intellectualism over the past two decades, and of the need for critical engagement in contemporary discourse as opposed to emotive arguments of a non-rational basis.
Rigney’s analysis of anti-intellectualism in the United States (1991, pp. 434–451) finds that such opposition to rational dialogue in fact stems from the very academic elitism which pervaded for decades—in some cases, as late as the 1980s—and confirms Hoggart’s argument that digital literacy is crucial for the formation of a society where popular culture can operate as a cultural force without devolving into populism. Given the current state of contemporary political discourse both in the United States and elsewhere, the negative effects of such anti-intellectualism are arguably already being felt.
From these texts, I gather that formal education systems need to better implement programs to encourage digital literacy as a life skill, and also as a mode of critical engagement with current discourse. As Hartley points out, formal education systems all over the world are only recently grasping the concept of digital literacy, whereas before it had been relatively neglected and had spread through informal structures and popular demand.
References
Hartley, J. 2009, ‘Repurposing Literacy’, in The Uses of Digital Literacy, pp.1-38.
Rigney, D. 1991, ‘Three Kinds of Anti-Intellectualism: Rethinking Hofstadter’. Sociological Inquiry, 61, pp. 434–451. doi:10.1111/j.1475-682X.1991.tb00172.x
Digital Literacies 