Digital Literacy

1.What did you think “digital literacies” meant before taking this course? Had you heard anything similar to it? 

Before this course I thought that digital literacies meant the advanced extent of knowledge one has obtained regarding the use of technology, and your skills when using the internet. However, now I know that it also regards safety, security, copyright laws, and citation, as well as using different tools.

2. Read this article about the differences between digital literacies and digital skills. Reflect on what the article adds to your knowledge and give an example from your own practices/life that differentiates between digital skills and literacies

This article taught me the importance of recognizing copyright laws, getting permissions for certain things, securing private information, password-protecting my accounts, and altering what is made public. Before streaming the internet, I don’t usually think about what issues lie behind every action I take. I only visited the security part of my facebook account once, and that was after we learnt about hackers in school.

In Egypt, people do not usually abide by permissions, citations, or copyright rules, for example, torrents are legal are readily available here, whereas in developed countries, you could get arrested. I learnt that I need to alter not only the pictures I post, but also who can see them, my comments, my passwords, and who I interact with online. You always hear about online bullies and hackers, but you never think it’s gonna happen to you, that’s why I feel like not everyone pays much attention to how safe and secure you and your accounts are on the internet.

I feel that I am competent in digital skills, for example, I can effectively use Microsoft office, browse the internet for sources, distinguish between scholarly and non-scholarly sources, cite, paraphrase, copy, paste, and all these simple daily tools. However, I feel like I am not as confident when it comes to digital literacies. For example, I was not aware of the eight elements of digital literacies by Doug Belshaw, nor was I as knowledgeable about the risks of being online as I am now, and hope to be more aware of by the end of this course. I did not think I needed different passwords for different accounts, nor did I ever think about filtering what goes on my accounts because it could one day jeopardize my job..

3. Listen to this podcast episode on the universe of digital literacy (it also has a transcript if you prefer to read). Reflect on the most important things you learned from it, and how you think this all applies to the Egyptian context and your personal context.

The podcast begins with the teacher explaining to her students how crucial it is to log out of their accounts and applications daily in order to be safe and secure online. I recall being told to do the same thing in high-school, because securing yourself online was a crucial part of our ICT (information and communication technology) class. However, I can safely say that public schools in Egypt would not pay much attention, if any, to digital literacy, and being safe and secure online.

Monita Bell discusses how disturbing it is that 95% of teens have phones and 45% are online a lot…Monita, I’d like to personally invite you on a friendly visit to Egypt where babies here have instagram accounts, even before they can say mama and papa, and pets have them too! When it comes to detecting fake news, teens are a lot more competent and educated on the matter than elders, however, we’re not pros when it comes to detecting viruses, safety, or potential of being hacked online.

Personally, I don’t lose sleep over the thought of being tracked online, and hackers getting access to every move I make, I’m sure online hackers have more fulfilling lives than to watch me go to McDonald’s everyday like its the answer to all third world problems (it is by the way).

Matthew Johnson brought up a very interesting point though. When Monita was talking about the education of digital literacy during her generation versus now, he said that “what’s really changed is the low barrier to publication and distribution of information”. I agree, I feel like now, literally anyone can be online, and have access to anything in the matter of seconds, if someone so much as Googles your name, your facebook account will come up, and anyone can visit your profile, or see your posts and pictures if you’re not private. People can make music, videos, websites, edit photos, and use applications to alter or produce any type of media.

Also, they focused a lot on the issue of ‘hate speech’, and Monita mentioned a crucial issue through which I resonate and can relate to. She said that there was a huge internet fude regarding the Colin Kaepernick situation because he said that “black people, “act like animals.”” The students in my university are all part of a facebook group, and one day an atheist girl decided she was bored, so she decided to slander Muslims. It is one thing not to believe in something, but to make fun of an entire religion, diss the people who follow it, and completely ridicule the logic behind the religion and the messengers involved. She added edited photos of our prophets where she mocked them, and was extremely rude and insensitive towards the millions of muslims on the group, who she made fun of, belittled, and defamed. I had never felt more attacked, angry, nor discriminated against in my life, because, not only is Islam  my religion, but it is also a part of my identity, so to have a stranger publicly harass my religion so freely, angered my to an extent that words cannot explain, because I was powerless, and the most I could do was report her, which effectively removed her post online, but that’s it, she got off scot-free. But that was not enough, no one should be allowed to get away with discriminating against anyone or anything online without punishment. For me, that’s the worst part about being online, you can’t actually do anything.

Surely in Egypt we face a lot of microaggression too, for example, a lot of guys throw “housewife” jokes at me all the time, because essentially that’s what they believe is a woman’s real purpose in life, to make sandwiches for them. I get discriminated against a lot whenever I travel abroad, I can see the disappointment on people’s faces when I say I’m Egyptian, I can tell the way their body language changes, their voice changes, and their facial expressions change, from before they associate me with a certain race, to when they know I’m Egyptian. I see how less happy they are to talk to me, to see me, and I start to notice how little their responses become, instead of engaging in full-time small talk, they start to fade away from conversation, avoiding this so-called uneducated and animalistic “Arab”, they do this especially when my veiled mother is next to me.

Another horrible incident that occurred to me was when I was in London, and someone threw a glass beer bottle on my aunt’s head, hoping to kill her, and yes of course, she was also veiled. But when something like this happens in real life, you can physically report it, you can go to the police, file a case, or at least take your revenge back in any way, but online, you sort of just have to accept it, you have to take it in, because there’s nothing you can actually do to affect the discriminators life.

4. Find an article, podcast or video on your own that discusses digital literacies and offer a summary and reflection of what you learned from it.

Although this video is slightly informal, it is very informative, because it mocks people who do not know or believe they’re actually involved in microaggression. Steven Crowder started the video by saying a lot of people think they are the minority that have never engaged in microaggression, so he interviewed random bystanders on the street to see whether they knew what the term microaggression meant or not, and only one did, she’s a female white feminist. He mentioned the “male white privilege” , which is the single most powerful breed of humans in the entire world.

I remember I took a class called Labor Economics where we studied different laborers in different markets over the world, and we found studies in America that showed that people working the same job, with the same years of experience, and the same skills, got different salaries depending on their racial background and gender. The highest salaries went to white males, then black males, then white women, then black women.

Crowder mentions you can be a racist, sexist, or any kind of discriminator, even if you don’t know it. He mentions that because white males face the least, if any, discrimination, they’re more likely to be the ones who perform the microaggression.