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The Digital Information Age

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Student Writing in the Digital Age

Essays filled with “LOL” and emojis? College student writing today actually is longer and contains no more errors than it did in 1917.

“Kids these days” laments are nothing new, but the substance of the lament changes. Lately, it has become fashionable to worry that “kids these days” will be unable to write complex, lengthy essays. After all, the logic goes, social media and text messaging reward short, abbreviated expression. Student writing will be similarly staccato, rushed, or even—horror of horrors—filled with LOL abbreviations and emojis.

In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. Students in first-year composition classes are, on average, writing longer essays (from an average of 162 words in 1917, to 422 words in 1986, to 1,038 words in 2006), using more complex rhetorical techniques, and making no more errors than those committed by freshman in 1917. That’s according to a longitudinal study of student writing by Andrea A. Lunsford and Karen J. Lunsford, “ Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study. ”

In 2006, two rhetoric and composition professors, Lunsford and Lunsford, decided, in reaction to government studies worrying that students’ literacy levels were declining, to crunch the numbers and determine if students were making more errors in the digital age.

They began by replicating previous studies of American college student errors. There were four similar studies over the past century. In 1917, a professor analyzed the errors in 198 college student papers; in 1930, researchers completed similar studies of 170 and 20,000 papers, respectively. In 1986, Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford (of the 2006 study) decided to see if contemporary students were making more or fewer errors than those earlier studies showed, and analyzed 3,000 student papers from 1984. The 2006 study (published in 2008) follows the process of these earlier studies and was based on 877 papers (one of the most interesting sections of “Mistakes Are a Fact of Life” discusses how new IRB regulations forced researchers to work with far fewer papers than they had before.

Remarkably, the number of errors students made in their papers stayed consistent over the past 100 years. Students in 2006 committed roughly the same number of errors as students did in 1917. The average has stayed at about 2 errors per 100 words.

What has changed are the kinds of errors students make. The four 20th-century studies show that, when it came to making mistakes, spelling tripped up students the most. Spelling was by far the most common error in 1986 and 1917, “the most frequent student mistake by some 300 percent.” Going down the list of “top 10 errors,” the patterns shifted: Capitalization was the second most frequent error 1917; in 1986, that spot went to “no comma after introductory element.”

In 2006, spelling lost its prominence, dropping down the list of errors to number five. Spell-check and similar word-processing tools are the undeniable cause. But spell-check creates new errors, too: The new number-one error in student writing is now “wrong word.” Spell-check, as most of us know, sometimes corrects spelling to a different word than intended; if the writing is not later proof-read, this computer-created error goes unnoticed. The second most common error in 2006 was “incomplete or missing documentation,” a result, the authors theorize, of a shift in college assignments toward research papers and away from personal essays.

Additionally, capitalization errors have increased, perhaps, as Lunsford and Lunsford note, because of neologisms like eBay and iPod. But students have also become much better at punctuation and apostrophes, which were the third and fifth most common errors in 1917. These had dropped off the top 10 list by 2006.

The study found no evidence for claims that kids are increasingly using “text speak” or emojis in their papers. Lunsford and Lunsford did not find a single such instance of this digital-era error. Ironically, they did find such text speak and emoticons in teachers’ comments to students. (Teachers these days?)

The most startling discovery Lunsford and Lunsford made had nothing to do with errors or emojis. They found that college students are writing much more and submitting much longer papers than ever. The average college essay in 2006 was more than double the length of the average 1986 paper, which was itself much longer than the average length of papers written earlier in the century. In 1917, student papers averaged 162 words; in 1930, the average was 231 words. By 1986, the average grew to 422 words. And just 20 years later, in 2006, it jumped to 1,038 words.

Why are 21st-century college students writing so much more? Computers allow students to write faster. (Other advances in writing technology may explain the upticks between 1917, 1930, and 1986. Ballpoint pens and manual and electric typewriters allowed students to write faster than inkwells or fountain pens.) The internet helps, too: Research shows that computers connected to the internet lead K-12 students to “conduct more background research for their writing; they write, revise, and publish more; they get more feedback on their writing; they write in a wider variety of genres and formats; and they produce higher quality writing.”

The digital revolution has been largely text-based. Over the course of an average day, Americans in 2006 wrote more than they did in 1986 (and in 2015 they wrote more than in 2006). New forms of written communication—texting, social media, and email—are often used instead of spoken ones—phone calls, meetings, and face-to-face discussions. With each text and Facebook update, students become more familiar with and adept at written expression. Today’s students have more experience with writing, and they practice it more than any group of college students in history.

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In shifting from texting to writing their English papers, college students must become adept at code-switching, using one form of writing for certain purposes (gossiping with friends) and another for others (summarizing plots). As Kristen Hawley Turner writes in “ Flipping the Switch: Code-Switching from Text Speak to Standard English ,” students do know how to shift from informal to formal discourse, changing their writing as occasions demand. Just as we might speak differently to a supervisor than to a child, so too do students know that they should probably not use “conversely” in a text to a friend or “LOL” in their Shakespeare paper. “As digital natives who have had access to computer technology all of their lives, they often demonstrate in theses arenas proficiencies that the adults in their lives lack,” Turner writes. Instructors should “teach them to negotiate the technology-driven discourse within the confines of school language.”

Responses to Lunsford and Lunsford’s study focused on what the results revealed about mistakes in writing: Error is often in the eye of the beholder . Teachers mark some errors and neglect to mention (or find) others. And, as a pioneering scholar of this field wrote in the 1970s, context is key when analyzing error: Students who make mistakes are not “indifferent…or incapable” but “beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes.”

College students are making mistakes, of course, and they have much to learn about writing. But they are not making more mistakes than did their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Since they now use writing to communicate with friends and family, they are more comfortable expressing themselves in words. Plus, most have access to technology that allows them to write faster than ever. If Lunsford and Lunsford’s findings about the average length of student papers stays true, today’s college students will graduate with more pages of completed prose to their name than any other generation.

If we want to worry about college student writing, then perhaps what we should attend to is not clipped, abbreviated writing, but overly verbose, rambling writing. It might be that editing skills—deciding what not to say, and what to delete—may be what most ails the kids these days.

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7 Digital literacies and the skills of the digital age

Cathy L. Green, Oklahoma State University

Oklahoma State University

Abstract – This chapter is intended to provide a framework and understanding of digital literacy, what it is and why it is important. The following pages explore the roots of digital literacy, its relationship to language literacy and its role in 21 st century life.

Introduction

Unlike previous generations, learning in the digital age is marked by the use of rapidly evolving technology, a deluge of information and a highly networked global community (Dede, 2010). In such a dynamic environment, learners need skills beyond the basic cognitive ability to consume and process language. In other words: To understand what the characteristics of the digital age, and of digital learners, means for how people learn in this new and changing landscape, one may turn to the evolving discussion of literacy or, as one might say now, of digital literacy. The history of literacy contextualizes digital literacy and illustrates changes in literacy over time. By looking at literacy as a historical phenomenon, the characteristics of which have evolved over time, we can glean the fundamental characteristics of the digital age. Those characteristics in turn illuminate the skills needed in order to take advantage of digital environments. The following discussion is an overview of digital literacy, its essential components and why it is important for learning in a digital age.

Moving from Literacy to Digital Literacy

Literacy refers to the ability of people to read and write (UNESCO, 2017). Reading and writing then, is about encoding and decoding information between written symbols and sound (Resnick, 1983; Tyner, 1998). More specifically, literacy is the ability to understand the relationship between sounds and written words such that one may read, say and understand them (UNESCO, 2004; Vlieghe, 2015). Literacy is often considered a skill or competency and is often referred to as such. Children and adults alike can spend years developing the appropriate skills for encoding and decoding information.

Over the course of thousands of years, literacy has become much more common and widespread with a global literacy rate ranging from 81% to 90% depending on age and gender (UNESCO, 2016). From a time when literacy was the domain of an elite few, it has grown to include huge swaths of the global population. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which are some of the advantages the written word can provide. Kaestle, (1985) tells us that “literacy makes it possible to preserve information as a snapshot in time, allows for recording, tracking and remembering information, and sharing information more easily across distances among others” (p. 16). In short, literacy led “to the replacement of myth by history and the replacement of magic by skepticism and science. Writing allowed bureaucracy, accounting, and legal systems with universal rules and has replaced face-to-face governance with depersonalized administration” (Kaestle, 1985, p. 16). This is not to place a value judgement on the characteristics of literacy but rather to explain some of the many reasons why it spread.

There are, however, other reasons for the spread of literacy. In England, throughout the middle ages literacy grew in part, because people who acquired literacy skills were able to parlay those skills into work with more pay and social advantages (Clanchy, 1983). The great revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries also relied on leaders who could write and compatriots who could read as a way to spread new ideas beyond the street corners and public gatherings of Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Literacy was perceived as necessary for spreading information to large numbers of people. In the 1970’s Paulo Freire insisted that literacy was vital for people to participate in their own governance and civic life (Tyner, 1998). His classic “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” begins from the premise that bringing the traditional illiterate and uneducated into learning situations as partners with their teachers awakens the critical conscience necessary as a foundation for action to foment change (Freire, 1973). UNESCO (2004) also acknowledges the role that literacy plays in enabling populations to effect change and achieve social justice aims. They speak even more broadly, moving beyond the conditions necessary for revolution, contending that literacy is a fundamental right of every human being, providing employment opportunities, and the fundamental skills necessary to accrue greater wealth and improve one’s quality of life.

Although the benefits of literacy were a driving force in its spread, technological advances also enabled the spread of literacy to greater and greater numbers of people. From stamped tokens, tally sticks and clay tablets, to ancient scrolls, handwritten volumes, the printing press, typewriters, and finally computers, technology is largely responsible for driving the evolution of literacy into the particular forms of encoding and decoding information associated with the digital age. Technology has made it possible for literacy to move from the hands of the few to the hands of the masses and to morph into a digital environment with characteristics extending far beyond anything that has been seen before.

Not only did computers and electronic technology deliver literacy into the hands of many but also created an environment that made it possible to store vast amounts of information. Books and libraries led the way to making information easily available to the public, but within the age of computers and the internet the volume of accessible information is larger than ever, more readily available than ever, and changing more quickly than ever before. In the early 21st century, technology continues to develop more quickly than at any time in the past creating an environment that is constantly changing. These changes contribute to the need for different skills beyond traditional literacy skills also called new media literacy (Jenkins, 2018). For a short video on the reasons why digital literacy is important visit “ The New Media Literacies ” located on YouTube.com and created by the research team at Project New Media Literacies.

Literacy in the Digital Age

If literacy involves the skills of reading and writing, digital literacy requires the ability to extend those skills in order to effectively take advantage of the digital world (ALA, 2013). More general definitions express digital literacy as the ability to read and understand information from digital sources as well as to create information in various digital formats (Bawden, 2008; Gilster, 1997; Tyner, 1998; UNESCO, 2004). Developing digital skills allows digital learners to manage a vast array of rapidly changing information and is key to both learning and working in an evolving digital landscape (Dede, 2010; Koltay, 2011; Mohammadyari & Singh, 2015). As such, it is important for people to develop certain competencies specifically for handling digital content.

People who adapt well to the digital world exhibit characteristics enabling them to develop and maintain digital literacy skills. Lifelong learning is a key characteristic necessary for handling rapid changes in technology and information and thus, critical to digital literacy. Successful digital learners have a high level of self-motivation, a desire for active modes of learning and they exercise the ability to learn how to learn. Maintaining and learning new technical skills also benefits learners in the digital age and an attitude of exploration and play will help learners stay engaged and energized in a world where speed of change and volume of information could otherwise become overwhelming (Dede, 2010; Jenkins, 2018; Visser, 2012). A final characteristic of a digital learner includes the ability to engage in a global network with a greater awareness of one’s place and audience in that network. Together, these characteristics of the digital age guide us in understanding what traits a learner will require to be successful in the digital environment. The following section will help understand what lies at the intersection of digital skills and traits of successful digital learners by reviewing existing digital literacy frameworks.

Reviewing Existing Frameworks for Digital Literacy/ies

Digital literacy is alternately described as complicated, confusing, too broad to be meaningful and always changing (Heitin, 2016; Pangrazio, 2014; Tyner, 1998; Williams, 2006). Due to this confusion, some feel it best to completely avoid the term digital literacy altogether and instead opt for the terms such as digital competencies (Buckingham, 2006), 21st century skills (Williamson, 2011) or digital skills (Heitin, 2016). Another way to sort out the confusion is to look at digital literacy as multiple literacies (Buckingham, 2006; Lankshear & Knobel, 2008; UNESCO, 2004)

Here, I take the latter approach and look at digital literacy as a collection of literacies each of which play a significant role in learning in a digital world. Ng (2012), operationalizes digital literacy as a framework of multiple, specific competencies which, when combined, form a cohesive collection of skills. By taking this approach, we link the characteristics of the digital environment as well as those of the digital learner not to a single digital skill but rather a set of digital literacy practices. In this way, we can consider the various skills needed to navigate the digital world in an organized and consistent manner.

Ng (2012) proposes a three-part schema for discussing the overlapping functional characteristics of a digitally competent person: technical, cognitive, and social (see Figure 1).

Technical literacy, also referred to as operational literacy, refers to the mastery of technical skills and tasks required to access and work with digital technology such as how to operate a computer; use a mouse and keyboard; open software; cut, copy and paste data and files, acquire an internet connection and so on (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008). The cognitive area of digital literacy focuses on activities such as critical thinking, problem solving and decision making (Williamson, 2011) and includes the ability to “evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments”(Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan, 2006, p. 5). The third of Ng’s three categories – social literacies – covers a wide range of activities which together constitute the ability to communicate in a digital environment both socially and professionally, understand cyber security, follow “netiquette” protocols, and navigate discussions with care so as not to misrepresent or create misunderstandings (Ng, 2012). Of particular note, Ng captures the essence of digital literacy by showing how digital literacy exists at the intersection of the technical, cognitive and social aspects of literacy which are referred to as dimensions. Ng’s framework is not, however, a digital literacy framework itself. Instead it provides a vehicle for exploring the various components of digital literacy at a conceptual level while remaining clear that the individual skills are at all times connected to and dependent upon each other.

There are a number of organizations that publish their own framework for digital literacies including the International Society for Technology in Education ICT Skills (ISTE), the American Association of College and Universities (AACU), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the American Library Association (ALA), and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills among others (Dede, 2010). The digital frameworks exhibit many similarities, and a few differences. There are some differences in the terminology and organization of these frameworks, but they all include similar skills. What follows is a brief overview of the different digital frameworks. See Figure 2 for a composite of these frameworks.

Figure 2. Major Frameworks for 21st Century Skills (American Library Association, 2013; Dede, 2010; SCONUL, 2016; Vockley & Lang, 2008)

Each of the frameworks come from a slightly different angle and will at times reflect the background from which they come. The American Library Association (ALA) framework evolved out of the information literacy tradition of libraries, while the American Association of College and Universities (AACU) and the Society of College and University Libraries (SOCNUL) evolved from higher education perspective, the Partnership for 21st century learning addresses K-12 education, and the ISTE is steeped in a more technical tradition. Even with these different areas of focus the components of each framework are strikingly similar although some in more detail than others. Three of the six specifically address the skills necessary for accessing, searching and finding information in a digital environment while the other three have broader categories in which one might expect to find these skills including, research and information fluency, intellectual skills, and ICT literacy. Cognitive skills required for digital literacy are also covered by all of the frameworks in varying degrees of specificity. Among them one will find references to evaluating, understanding, creating, integrating, synthesizing, creativity and innovation. Finally, four of the six digital frameworks pay homage to the necessity of solid communication skills. They are in turn, referred to as life skills, personal and social responsibility, communication, collaboration, digital citizenship and collective intelligence.

What seems oddly missing from this list of skills is the technical component which only appears explicitly in the ISTE list of skills. The partnership for 21st century learning uses ICT literacy as a designation for the ability to use technology and the ALA, in discussing its framework, makes it clear that technical proficiency is a foundational requirement for digital literacy skills. Even with these references to technical skills the digital literacy frameworks are overwhelmingly partial to the cognitive and social focus of digital skills and technical proficiency tends to be glossed over compared to the other dimensions. Even though technical skills receive relatively little attention by comparison we will assume for this discussion, technical skills are a prerequisite to the other digital skills, and we will look more carefully at each of them in the next section.

To fully understand the many digital literacies, we will use the ALA framework as a point of reference for further discussion using the other frameworks and other materials to further elucidate each skill area. The ALA framework is laid out in terms of basic functions with enough specificity to make it easy to understand and remember but broad enough to cover a wide range of skills. The ALA framework includes the following areas:

Understanding,
Evaluating,
Creating, and
Communicating (American Library Association, 2013).

Finding information in a digital environment represents a significant departure from the way human beings have searched for information for centuries. The learner must abandon older linear or sequential approaches to finding information such as reading a book, using a card catalog, index or table of contents and instead use lateral approaches like natural language searches, hypermedia text, keywords, search engines, online databases and so on (Dede, 2010; Eshet, 2002). The shift from sequential to lateral involves developing the ability to construct meaningful search parameters (SCONUL, 2016) whereas before, finding the information would have meant simply looking up page numbers based on an index or sorting through a card catalog. Although finding information may depend to some degree on the search tool being used (library, internet search engine, online database, etc.) the search results also depend on how well a person is able to generate appropriate keywords and construct useful Boolean searches. Failure in these two areas could easily return too many results to be helpful, vague or generic results, or potentially no useful results at all (Hangen, 2015).

Not immediately obvious, but part of the challenge of finding information is the ability to manage the results. Because there is so much data, changing so quickly, in so many different formats it can be challenging to organize and store it in such a way as to be useful. SCONUL (2016) talks about this as the ability to organize, store, manage and cite digital resources while the Educational Testing Service also specifically mentions the skills to access and manage information. Some ways to accomplish these tasks is through the use of social bookmarking tools such as Diigo, clipping and organizing software such as Evernote and OneNote, and bibliographic software. Many sites, such as YouTube allow individuals with an account to bookmark videos as well as create channels or collections of videos for specific topics or uses. Other websites have similar features.

Understanding

Understanding in the context of digital literacy perhaps most closely resembles traditional literacy in so much as it too, is the ability to read and interpret text (Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan, 2006). In the digital age, however, the ability to read and understand extends much further than text alone. For example, searches may return results with any combination of text, video, sound, and audio as well as still and moving pictures. As the internet has evolved, there have evolved a whole host of visual languages such as moving images, emoticons, icons, data visualizations, videos and combinations of all of the above. Lankshear & Knoble, (2008) refer to these modes of communication as “post typographic textual practice”. Understanding the variety of modes of digital material may also be referred to as multimedia literacy (Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan, 2006), visual literacy (Tyner, 1998), and digital literacy (Buckingham, 2006).

Evaluating digital media requires competencies ranging from evaluating the importance of a piece of information to determine its accuracy and its source. Evaluating information is not new to the digital age, but the nature of digital information can make it more difficult to understand who the source of information is and whether it can be trusted (Jenkins, 2018). When there is abundant and rapidly changing data across heavily populated networks, anyone with access can generate information online, making decisions about its authenticity, trustworthiness, relevance, and significance daunting. Learning evaluative digital skills means learning to ask questions about who is writing the information, why they are writing it, and who the intended audience is (Buckingham, 2006). Developing critical thinking skills is part of the literacy of evaluating and assessing the suitability for the use of a specific piece of information (SCONUL, 2016).

Looking for secondary sources of information can help confirm the authenticity and accuracy of online data and researching the credentials and affiliations of the author is another way to find out more about whether an article is trustworthy or valid. One may find other places the author has been published and verify they are legitimate. Sometimes one may be able to review affiliated organizations to attest to the expertise of the author such finding out where an employee works if they are a member of a professional organization or a leading researcher in a given field. All of these provide essential clues for use in evaluating information online.

Creating in the digital world makes explicit the production of knowledge and ideas in digital formats. While writing is a critical component of traditional literacy, it is not the only creative tool in the digital toolbox. Other tools are available and include creative activities such as podcasting, making audio-visual presentations, building data visualizations, 3D printing, writing blogs and new tools that haven’t even been thought of yet. In short, all formats in which digital information may be consumed, a digitally literate individual will also want to be able to use in the creation of a product. A key component of creating with digital tools is understanding what constitutes fair use and what is considered plagiarism. While this is not new to the digital age, it may be more challenging to find the line between copying and extending someone else’s work.

In part, the reason for the increased difficulty of finding the line between plagiarism and new work is the “cut and paste culture” of the internet referred to as “reproduction literacy” (Eshet 2002, p.4) also referred to as appropriation in Jenkins’ New Media Literacies (Jenkins, 2018). The question is, what can one change and how much can one change work without being considered copying? This skill requires the ability to think critically, evaluate a work and make appropriate decisions. There are tools and information to help understand and find those answers such as the creative commons. Learning about these resources and learning how to use them is part of this digital literacy.

Communicating

Communicating is the final category of digital skills in the ALA digital framework. The capacity to connect with individuals all over the world creates unique opportunities for learning and sharing information for which developing digital communication skills is vital. Some of the skills required for communicating in a digital environment include digital citizenship, collaboration, and cultural awareness. This is not to say that one does not need to develop communication skills outside of the digital environment but that the skills required for digital communication go beyond what is required in a non-digital environment. Most of us are adept at personal, face to face communication but digital communication needs the ability to engage in asynchronous environments such as email, online forums, blogs and social media platforms where what we say can’t always be deleted but can be easily misinterpreted. Add that to an environment where people number in the millions and the opportunities for misunderstandings and cultural miscues are much more likely.

The communication category of digital literacies covers an extensive array of skills above and beyond what one might need for face to face interactions. It includes competencies around ethical and moral behavior, responsible communication for engagement in social and civic activities (Adam Becker et al., 2017), an awareness of audience and an ability to evaluate the potential impact of one’s actions online. It also includes skills for handling privacy and security in online environments. These activities fall into two main categories of activity including digital citizenship and collaboration.

Digital citizenship refers to one’s ability to interact effectively in the digital world. Part of this skill is good manners, often referred to as “netiquette. There is a level of context which is often missing in digital communication due to physical distance, lack of personal familiarity with people online and the sheer volume of people who may come in contact with our words. People who know us well may understand exactly what we mean when we say something sarcastic or ironic, but those and other vocal and facial cues are missing in most digital communication making it more likely we will be misunderstood. Also, we are also more likely to misunderstand or be misunderstood if we remain unaware of cultural differences amongst people online. So, digital citizenship includes an awareness of who we are, what we intend to say and how it might be perceived by other people we do not know (Buckingham, 2006). It is also a process of learning to communicate clearly and in ways that help others understand what we mean.

Another key digital skill is collaboration, and it is essential for effective participation in digital projects via the internet. The internet allows people to engage with others we may never see in person and work towards common goals be they social, civic or business oriented. Creating a community and working together requires a degree of trust and familiarity that can be difficult to build given the physical distance between participants. Greater awareness must be paid to inclusive behavior, and more explicit efforts need to be made to make up for perceived or actual distance and disconnectedness. So, while the promise of digital technology to connect people is impressive it is not necessarily an automatic transition, and it requires new skills.

Parting thoughts.

It is clear from our previous discussion of digital literacy that technology and technical skills underpin every other digital skill. A failure to understand hardware, software, the nature of the internet, cloud-based technologies and an inability to learn new concepts and tools going forward handicaps one’s ability to engage with the cognitive and social literacies. While there are sometimes tacit references to technical skills and ability, extant digital literacy frameworks tend to focus more on the cognitive and social aspects of digital environments. There is an implied sense that once technical skills are learned, we the digitally literate person can forget about them and move on to the other skills. Given the rapid pace of technological change in the last 40 years, however, anyone working in a digital environment would be well advised to keep in mind that technical concepts and tools continue to develop. It does not seem likely that we will ever reach a point where people can simply take technological skills for granted and to do so would undermine our ability to address the other digital skills.

Another way to think of this is to recognize that no matter what the skill, none of them operate independently of one another. Whether searching, creating, evaluating, understanding or communicating, it is a combination of skills (or literacies) that allow us to accomplish our goals. Thinking critically, and evaluating information and sources leads to sound decision-making. Understanding and synthesizing information is necessary for creating and again the technical tools are necessary for completing the product. Finding information is of little use if one is unable to analyze its usefulness and creating a great video or podcast will not mean much if one is unable to navigate social and professional networks to communicate those works to others. If only understood in isolation, digital literacies have little meaning and can be of little use in approaching digital environments.

Ng’s (2012) conceptual framework reminds us that digital literacy is that space where technical, cognitive and social literacies overlap. A digital skill is not the same thing as digital literacy but the two are fully intwined. Acquiring digital skills is only the beginning of a study of digital literacies, however, and it would be a mistake to stop here. Furthermore, digital literacies span multiple areas including both the cognitive and the social. The real value of digital literacy lies in understanding the synergistic effect of individual digital literacy skills integrated with sets of competencies that enable one to work effectively in the digital world.

Learning Activities.

Literacy Narratives are stories about reading and composing in any form or context. They often include poignant memories that involve a personal experience with literacy. Digital literacy narratives can sometimes be categorized as narratives that focus on how the writer came to understand the importance of technology in his/her life or teaching pedagogy. More often, they are simply narratives that use a medium beyond the print-based essay to tell the story.

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 20(1), available at http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.1/praxis/bourelle-et-al

Combining both aspects of the genre, write a piece based on your technological literacy, choosing a medium you feel best conveys the message you want to share with your audience.
Find and read 2-4 literacy narratives online that emphasize the use of technology and write a short reflection that discusses the main digital literacies used, summarizes the main points made and describes the elements you felt were most important. Also, describe any digital literacy skills you utilized to complete the assignment.
Create your literacy narrative that tells the story of a significant experience of your own with digital literacy. Use a multi-modal tool that includes audio and images or video. Share with your classmates and discuss the most important ideas you noticed in others’ narratives.
Compare two of the literacy frameworks in Figure 2. How are they alike? How are they different? Do you like one better than the other? Why or Why not?
Digital Literacy and why it matters – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2k3C-iB88w
The essential elements of digital literacies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yQPoTcZ78
What is a Literacy Narrative? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mhl2j-cpZo
Benji Bissman’s computer literacy narrative – http://daln.osu.edu/handle/2374.DALN/2327 [site can’t be reached, KE 6.12.24]
Global Digital Literacy Council [page not found, KE 6.12.24]
International Society for Technology in Education
Information and Communication Technologies [site can’t be reached, KE 6.12.24]
Education Development Center, Inc.
International Visual Literacy Association
http://mediasmarts.ca/digital-media-literacy-fundamentals/digital-literacy-fundamentals
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/digitalliteracy/overview.aspx [page not found, KE 6.12.24]
. http://info.learning.com/hubfs/Corp_Site/Sales%20Tools/12EssentialSkills_Brochure_Apr16.pdf [page not found, KE 6.12.24]
http://www. digitalliteracy.us
https://k12.thoughtfullearning.com/FAQ/what-are-literacy-skills

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How the Digital Age Is Affecting Students

Five books that give insight into how social media and technology are shaping today’s students and their learning.

Teachers don’t have to look far to see how changes in technology and social media are shaping students and influencing classrooms. We watch kids obsess over the latest apps as they chat before class. We marvel at the newest slang edging its way into student essays, and wonder at the ways constant smartphone communication is shaping students’ friendships, bullying, and even study habits.

To understand the internet-savvy students who fill our classrooms and the changing landscape of social media they inhabit, we need more than hot new gadgets or expensive educational software. The book list below is a starting point if you’re looking for insight into how the digital age is shaping students and ideas about how you can respond in the classroom.

Each book was chosen for its combination of research, story, and applicability to the classroom. Grab one or two to help you invent new strategies to reach students or reimagine your application of technology in your classroom.

Social Media

If you’ve ever wondered what students are doing with all their time on the internet, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens is for you. Author danah boyd dissects how and why kids rush to the online world. Using student interviews and stories, boyd describes the ways youngsters use social media to connect, escape, and eke out a little privacy away from their parents and teachers. She includes a chapter on how the internet has shaped young people’s understanding of personal and public spaces. Read this book if you want to help students optimize the knowledge and skills they already have as digital natives.

A clinical psychologist and researcher at MIT, Sherry Turkle isn’t against the smartphones our students love so much. But she is worried that the obsession with phones—and the texting and social media posting they enable—is impacting in-person discussion and deep conversation. In her book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age , Turkle claims that students’ communication skills have changed. Her suggestions for taking back in-person conversation in a digital world can shape collaborative classrooms and guide teachers on how to help students improve peer-to-peer interactions.

Social media and the free flow of information have also influenced the language we use every day. In A World Without ‘Whom’: The Essential Guide to Language in the Buzzfeed Age , Emmy Favilla lays out a case for language shaped by the internet. This entertaining and informative 2017 book is peppered with pop culture examples ready for use in class, though like all pop culture references they’ll quickly become dated. Favilla’s writing is pragmatic; she offers advice on where to hold the line on traditional language and when readability and appeal to a new generation might be more important. As Favilla puts it, “We’re all just trying to be heard here.” The book is a timely reminder that social-media-fueled language innovation deserves some classroom discussion.

If you’re eager to understand larger trends affecting young students, pick up Jean Twenge’s iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood . Drawing from large data sets and longitudinal studies, Twenge examines everything from SAT scores to rates of loneliness. Her research-heavy book offers helpful hints about the impact of technology and other cultural changes. Read this book if you want to brainstorm about how to adapt classes and school structures to meet student needs. To bring students in on the conversation, consider using Twenge’s easy-to-read graphs as discussion kick-starters or as a way to provide historical context to current trends.

If you want to reimagine the way computers and video games might be used in the classroom, check out David Williamson Shaffer’s book How Computer Games Help Children Learn . A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Shaffer believes that video games can help schools foster creative thinking, problem solving, and strategic decision making. After all, making mistakes and trying out innovative strategies are less risky in a game than in real life. And even reluctant learners will often dive eagerly into video games. A lot has changed since the book’s publication in 2007, but its ideas—about what students can learn from video games, how video games engage students, and what issues to avoid—can guide you toward thoughtful, effective video game use.

Our students are steeped in the internet, social media, and all types of technological innovations, and it’s time for schools and teachers to carefully examine how these things interact with curriculum and learning.

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

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Many Tech Experts Say Digital Disruption Will Hurt Democracy
3. Concerns about democracy in the digital age

1. Themes about the digital disruption of democracy in the next decade
2. Broader thoughts from key experts on the future of democracy at a time of digital disruption
4. Hopeful themes and suggested solutions
5. Tech will have mixed effects that are not possible to guess now
About this canvassing of experts
Acknowledgments

About half of the experts responding to this canvassing said people’s uses of technology will mostly weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation, but even those who expressed optimism often voiced concerns. This section includes comments about problems that were made by all respondents regardless of their answer to the main question about the impact of technology on democracy by 2030. These worries are organized under seven themes.

Empowering the powerful: Corporate and government agendas generally do not serve democratic goals or achieve democratic outcomes. They serve the goals of those in power

An internet pioneer and technology developer and administrator predicted, “My expectation is that by 2030, as much of 75% of the world’s population will be enslaved by artificial intelligence-based surveillance systems developed in China and exported around the world. These systems will keep every citizen under observation 24 hours a day, seven days a week, monitoring their every action.”

Dan Gillmor, co-founder of the News Co/Lab at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and professor of practice in digital media literacy commented, “Governments (and their corporate partners) are broadly using technology to create a surveillance state, and what amounts to law by unaccountable black-box algorithm, far beyond anything Orwell imagined. But this can only happen in a society that can’t be bothered to protect liberty – or is easily led/stampeded into relinquishing it – and that is happening in more and more of the Western democracies. The re-emergence of public bigotry has nothing to do with technology, except to the extent that bigots use it to promote their malignant goals. Meanwhile, the institutions that are supposed to protect liberty – journalism among them – are mostly failing to do so. In a tiny number of jurisdictions, people have persuaded leaders to push back on the encroachments, such as a partial ban on government use of facial recognition in San Francisco. But the encroachments are overwhelming and accelerating.”

Leah Lievrouw, professor of information studies at the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote, “To date, virtually no democratic state or system has sorted out how to deal with this challenge to the fundamental legitimacy of democratic processes, and my guess is that only a deep and destabilizing crisis (perhaps growing out of the rise of authoritarian, ethnic or cultural nationalism) will prompt a serious response.”

Seth Finkelstein, programmer, consultant and EFF Pioneer of the Electronic Frontier Award winner, wrote, “Warren Buffett has said, ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ We can examine how this class warfare changes with advances in technology, analogous to how military warfare has been affected by technology. But no weapons technology to date has inevitably produced democracy over dictatorship (or vice-versa). For example, there once was a type of boosterism that talked about how ordinary people could make websites and promoted its very rare cause célèbre success. But that storyline is now going out of fashion. It’s finally getting to be pundit knowledge that there’s a whole system behind which material gets promoted. Paid professional liars can both make websites themselves and work this system better than amateurs. There’s currently a national panic over Russian trolls. But native fiends can do the same thing, with more skill, incentive and opportunities.”

David Bray, executive director for the People-Centered Internet Coalition, commented, “The power of narratives is exactly their ability to shape and institutionalize norms and power distribution in our human communities. … Now, however, our world is much broader than our immediate environment, and this has dangerous side effects, such as challenges in reaching consensus or disputing the relevant facts for a situation. We are seeing increasing polarization in open societies, partly as a result of these questions of where we want to go not being considered in ways that can translate to action. An even larger question is where do different localities want to go in terms of progress in parallel to what values or norms they want to hold dear? This is a question that spans sectors. No one organization or influencer or group with power can either solely answer or execute actions toward that desired future state. In the absence of finding ways to build bridges that span sectors, power – through narratives, laws, or technologies – will be grabbed by whomever aspires to this. An important question for the future is can we build such bridges across sectors? Will our divisions be our undoing as open, pluralistic societies? Can we develop narratives of hope for open, pluralistic societies that bring people together?”

Technology can improve or undermine democracy depending on how it is used and who controls it. Right now, it is controlled by too few. Kevin Gross

Miguel Moreno, professor of philosophy at the University of Granada, Spain, an expert in ethics, epistemology and technology, commented, “There is a clear risk of bias, manipulation, abusive surveillance and authoritarian control over social networks, the internet and any uncensored citizen expression platform, by private or state actors. There are initiatives promoted by state actors to isolate themselves from a common internet and reduce the vulnerability of critical infrastructures to cyberattacks. This has serious democratic and civic implications. In countries with technological capacity and a highly centralized political structure, favorable conditions exist to obtain partisan advantages by limiting social contestation, freedom of expression and eroding civil rights.”

Richard Jones, an entrepreneur based in Europe, said, “Government will lag exploitation of data by state and corporate actors in unforeseen ways. Biased censorship (both well-intentioned and corrupt) and propaganda onslaughts will shape opinions as – combined with an anti-scientific revolution – confidence in the institutions and establishment figures essential to peaceful orderly improvement of societies crumbles further. Hysterical smear attacks will further intensify as attempts to placate minority pressure groups continue. Biased technocratic groupthink will continue its march toward authoritarianism. Charismatic leadership will flourish in truly liberal systems. Authoritarianism will take root elsewhere. Online preference surveys may be developed to guide many choices facing government, but it is not clear that can correct the current democratic deficit in a helpful way. As during the Gutenberg process, accompanying the digestion of ‘free-range’ information will be the reevaluation of secular and religious values and objectives.”

John Sniadowski, a systems architect based in the United Kingdom, wrote, “It is proving very difficult to regulate multinational corporations because of the variety of different national government agendas. A globally enacted set of rules to control multinationals is unlikely to happen because some sovereign states have very illiberal and hierarchical control over agendas and see technology as a way to dominate their citizens with their agendas as well as influence the democratic viewpoints of what they consider to be hostile states. Democracy in technological terms can be weaponized.”

Kevin Gross, an independent technology consultant, commented, “Technology can improve or undermine democracy depending on how it is used and who controls it. Right now, it is controlled by too few. The few are not going to share willingly. I don’t expect this to change significantly by 2030. History knows that when a great deal of power is concentrated in the hands of a few, the outcome is not good for the many, not good for democracy.”

Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, said, “As of 2015, the outcomes of upward of 25 of the national elections in the world were being determined by Google’s search engine. Democracy as originally conceived cannot survive Big Tech as currently empowered. If authorities do not act to curtail the power of Big Tech companies – Google, Facebook and similar companies that might emerge in coming years – in 2030, democracy might look very much as it does now to the average citizen, but citizens will no longer have much say in who wins elections and how democracies are run. My research – dozens of randomized, controlled experiments involving tens of thousands of participants and five national elections – shows that Google search results alone can easily shift more than 20% of undecided voters – up to 80% in some demographic groups – without people knowing and without leaving a paper trail (see my paper on the search engine manipulation effect ). I’ve also shown that search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split – again, without people knowing they have been influenced. The content of answer boxes can increase the impact of the search engine manipulation effect by an additional 10% to 30%. I’ve identified about a dozen largely subliminal effects like these and am currently studying and quantifying seven of them. I’ve also shown that the ‘Go Vote’ prompt that Google posted on its home page on Election Day in 2018 gave one political party at least 800,000 more votes than went to the opposing party – possibly far more if the prompt had been targeted to the favored party.”

A longtime internet-rights activist based in South Africa responded, “Whether the powers of states and tech corporations can be reined in effectively is the current struggle. The genie is out of the bottle and it does not bode well for systems of democracy that have already been undermined in Western states. A state of global cyber war now exists and is likely to persist over the next decade. The oligopoly of state-supported tech companies, whether in the U.S. or China, will be difficult to break. It is trite to differentiate between a Google or an Alibaba – both received substantial state support from their respective governments – the Googles by failure to apply antitrust law to prevent monopolization, the Alibabas by state protection against competition in China.”

David P. Reed, a pioneering architect of the internet expert in networking, spectrum and internet policy, wrote, “‘Democracy’ in 2030 will be democracy in name only. The mechanisms of widespread corporate surveillance of user behavior and modification of user behavior are becoming so sophisticated that the citizen interests of democratic-structured countries will no longer be represented in any meaningful way. That is, by collecting vast amounts of information about user preferences and responses, and the use of highly targeted behavior modification techniques, citizens’ choices will be manipulated more and more in the interests of those who can pay to drive that system. The current forms of democracy limit citizen participation to election events every few years, where issues and candidates are structured by political parties into highly targeted single-vote events that do not represent individuals’ interests. Instead, a small set of provocative ‘wedge’ issues are made the entire focus of the citizen’s choice. This is not representation of interests. It is a managed poll that can easily be manipulated by behavior modification of the sort that technology is moving toward.”

A pioneering technology editor and reporter for one of the world’s foremost global news organizations wrote, “I do not have great faith that the institutions tasked with ensuring that online discourse is civil and adheres to standards of truth and fairness will be able to prevail over tendencies of autocratic governments and powerful private sector actors to use cyberspace for narrow political ends. … The internet has never had an effective governing body with any considerable clout to set policy that might guarantee network neutrality on a global scale, inhibit censorship and apply such conventions as the Universal Bill of Human Rights. Further, a handful of platforms whose moral compass has been questioned have come to dominate the online world. Some are dominated by governments. Others owe allegiance only to shareholders.”

Jerry Michalski, founder of REX, the Relationship Economy eXpedition, wrote, “‘Capital G’ Government has devolved into a phony consumer mass-marketing exercise. ‘Small g’ governance could involve active, ongoing collaboration among citizens, but it won’t as long as the major platforms they use have as their business models to addict them to TikTok videos, and to sell off their private data to companies that want to stalk them.”

Jonathan Kolber, author of “A Celebration Society: Solving the Coming Automation Crisis,” said, “Deepfakes will completely muddy the difference between facts and falsehood, a distinction that few citizens are equipped to make even now. This will have devastating effects upon democratic institutions and processes. … We are increasingly seeing George Orwell’s nightmare unfold as governments learn to use internet-enabled smart devices (televisions, smartphones, etc.) for surveillance. When the Internet of Things extends to smart cars, smart homes and so forth, the surveillance will be universal and unending. Governments are also increasingly redefining facts and history.”

A professor of computer science said, “Artificial intelligence technology, especially machine learning, has a feedback loop that strongly advantages first movers. Google’s advantages in being a better search engine have now been baked in by its ability to accumulate more data about user search behavior. This dynamic is inherently monopolistic, even more so than prior technological advances. Persuasive technologies built using these technologies are capable of refining and shaping public opinion with a reach and power that totalitarian governments of the 20th century could only dream of. We can be sure that today’s regulatory mood will either dissipate with nothing done, or more likely, become a driver that entrenches existing monopolies further by creating technical demands that no competitor can surmount. Democratic institutions will have a very difficult time countering this dynamic. Uber’s ‘greyball’ program, intended to defeat regulation and meaningful audit, is a harbinger of the future.”

Jonathan Taplin, author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy,” said, “Social media will continue to enable new and more-sophisticated forms of propaganda and disinformation. Artificial intelligence will enable deepfake videos that the average citizen will be taken in by. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter will continue to enable this content in their unending chase for revenue. Politicians will make noises about regulation, but since these platforms will become their primary source of advertising and publicity, they will never commit to the elimination of Safe Harbor and other rules that protect the social networks.”

Bulbul Gupta, founding adviser, Socos Labs, a think tank designing artificial intelligence to maximize human potential, responded, “Given the current state of tech and artificial intelligence ownership, I expect democracy to be even more unequal between the haves and have-nots by 2030, and a major uprising happening from the masses who are being quickly left behind. Tech and AI are owned by their creators, the top 1%, with decisions made about the 100% in every sector of society that have little to no transparency, human judgment or much recourse, and that may not get made the same if they were being forced to happen face to face. People will need their own personal AIs in their corner to protect their basic civil and human rights.”

Carlos Afonso, an internet pioneer and digital rights leader based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, wrote, “ Thomas Piketty and others demonstrate that inequality is, if anything, rising everywhere. Democracy understood as pluralist participation in political processes involving the electoral (supposedly unbiased) choices of government representatives, and the decision-making processes in building policies, legislation and regulation, cannot survive in these conditions. … One of the greatest achievements of the UN community was the consensus agreement on trying to reach the 17 sustainable development goals by 2030. However, conflicts of all kinds, internal and inter-country, give us no hope that the essential components of those goals will be achieved worldwide. Also, there is (partly in consequence of the various manifestations of a growing economic crisis with the financial speculators at the head of these processes) little chance that resources will increase to cover the essential needs of the majority.”

Even former pillars of democracy, Britain and France, are challenged by forces misusing digital tools. Norton Gusky

James Sigaru Wahu, assistant professor, media, culture and communication, New York University and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, wrote, “As we have seen across the Global North, tech has only worked to make worse offline tension. This has resulted in multiple challenges toward notions of democracy as shown by the Brexit debacle, 2016 presidential elections and violence against immigrant groups. We have also seen states get in the act through the use of technology to expand their surveillance powers, as is the case in China and in the UK (with its large CCTV camera presence). States in the Global South have also gotten into the surveillance game, which does not bode well for organizations and people advocating for human rights. What we have thus seen is countries like Russia and China growing in strength in tech surveillance and misinformation/disinformation while the United States and several police departments across the country rely on companies such as Palantir to expand their surveillance on citizens. Both of these have led to disastrous results.”

Lokman Tsui, professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, formerly Google’s Head of Free Expression in Asia and the Pacific, said, “The political economy of new technologies that are on the horizon leaves me with many concerns for how they will impact democracy and its institutions. First, many of the new technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data, are closed and centralized in nature. Unlike the open web before it, these technologies are closed and centralized, both in terms of technical design and also in terms of business model. The technology can indeed be used to improve democratic institutions and processes, but it will be hard and there will be many obstacles to overcome. Second, the new technologies are not only not helping democracies, but they, by their design, are also helping and strengthening non-democracies to further censorship and surveillance. While there are also technologies to counteract these tendencies, the balance tends to tip (heavily) in favor of the other side. Third, I’m concerned there is a global rat race toward the bottom when it comes to the collection of (personal) data, which has the potential to enable the suppression of many other rights.”

Norton Gusky, a futurist and advocate for implementing technology to empower people, commented, “For many years I truly believed that the internet would bring greater access to information that would strengthen democracy. However, in the past four to five years, I’ve witnessed a darker side to the internet. We now see countries like Russia interfering in the elections of not just the United States, but other countries throughout the world. I think there will be a swing, but for the next two to four years, the darker forces will prevail. We’ll see countries like Turkey, China and Egypt limiting the access to the ‘truth.’ Even former pillars of democracy, Britain and France, are challenged by forces misusing digital tools.”

Paola Ricaurte, fellow, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, wrote, “Even after we are aware of the negative implications that technology can have on democratic processes, we have not seen significant actions by the U.S. government to limit the power of tech corporations. The extraterritorial control of technology companies will be further expanded and will continue to have consequences for the democracies of the Global South. The knowledge gap between data-rich countries and data-poor countries will deepen.”

Ian O’Byrne, assistant professor of education at the College of Charleston, wrote, “Power and money ultimately influence decisions made by democratic bodies. With growing unrest, citizens can use social media and current/new digital tools to make themselves heard. Ultimately this will be pushed back again by existing powerholders and nothing may ultimately change. The existing powerholders will continue to exert their influence, and citizens will be left to continue to voice their opinions by shouting into the cyberverse.”

Jeffrey Alexander, senior manager for innovation policy at RTI International, said, “In societies where people are accustomed to power being centralized in a few institutions, and where central governments already exert power through surveillance and state authority, digital technology will facilitate intimidation, disinformation and other mechanisms for reducing individual liberty, suppressing minority opinion and enforcing authoritarian control. This will enable such governments to enhance the appearance of following democratic norms, such as offering ‘free and open’ elections, but use those mechanisms to reinforce their power by suppressing dissent well before voters reach the polls. In societies with strong individual education and a tradition of liberty and citizen-driven initiatives, digital technology could help thwart the rise of authoritarian rule, improve oversight and governance of law enforcement and policy processes, and enhance citizen involvement in government and politics.”

John Pike, director and founder of GlobalSecurity.org, said, “Democracy in 2030 will face the best of times and the worst of times. All the optimistic predictions about social media and other online implementations strengthening citizen participation will be realized. All the pessimistic predictions about the ease with which the surveillance state can manipulate public opinion will also be realized. Autocratic regimes such as Russia and China are skilled at such dark arts at home and will practice them globally. In the old days it was pretty obvious that the Communist Party USA member hawking the Daily Worker was working for Moscow, but now attribution is difficult and contested.”

Shane Kerr, an engineer for an internet security firm, said, “Those with resources will be able to harness technology more effectively to influence opinion and policies, ultimately working against democratic ideals. We already see this in a nascent form today, but it will likely evolve into such a pervasive narrative that the average citizen will not even be aware of it, unless they study history (assuming that ‘1984’-style revisionist history does not become the norm).”

[the fact that they]

Sasha Costanza-Chock, associate professor of civic media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote, “Core aspects of the democratic process are deeply stressed or broken. In the United States, we need significant reforms to enable broader and more meaningful participation in democratic decision-making, such as instant runoff or rank-order voting, expansion of voting days and times, expanded voting rights for formerly incarcerated people, campaign finance reform, rethinking the electoral college and much more. Unfortunately, most of these are extremely unlikely. Instead, we seem locked into an elitist and extremely expensive electoral system where the players with the most money and connection to wealthy backers rig the system to their advantage. In this context, many technological tools primarily advance those who can develop and customize them for their own ends – again, the biggest players. There are some countervailing forces such as the ability of insurgent candidates to leverage social media.”

Denise N. Rall, academic researcher of popular culture, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia, said, “I believe technology will help the dictators that we now have stay on top and control more aspects of all of our lives, worsening the prospects for democracy as has already happened in most economic powerhouses of the world (U.S., Russia, China, and right-wing elections in Europe, the absurdity of Brexit in the UK, North Korea, etc.). I think environmental degradation will increase exponentially and people will be fighting over resources like energy, water and food quite soon. I do not think technology will have the power to change these outcomes without real desire by governments to reduce resource consumption and a global birth control program of some kind.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “China has the potential to stall trends toward democracy and regime change through increased monitoring of their citizenry and refinement of their ‘social credit’ legislation/monetization of following the whims of their single party. There is a potential for China to help prop up regimes in developing countries where they have vested interests by distributing such technologies to undemocratic regimes that want to remain in power. I think that India could go either way depending on whether or not widespread corruptions in their political environment exploit or are thwarted by increased access to technology and information by their citizenry.”

Technologies of identification and surveillance will expand in usage, eating away at the private sphere of social life. Retired professor

Richard Lachmann, professor of political sociology at the State University of New York-Albany, said, “Democracy will continue to weaken but technology is only a secondary factor. More important in the decline of democracy are the disappearance or weakening of labor unions, the growing power of corporations in all sectors due to mergers, extreme levels of inequality and the ability of the rich and of political actors to manipulate ‘veto points’ to paralyze government initiatives, which then increases citizens’ cynicism about politicians and lessens their participation. All of these preceded the expansion of the internet and will not be significantly lessened by citizens’ online activities.”

Vince Carducci, researcher of new uses of communication to mobilize civil society and dean at the College of Creative Studies, wrote, “Institutional changes are occurring more as a function of power and money rather than technology, particularly in the selection of candidates and in the judicial system. Those are more of threat than technology.”

A cofounder of one of the internet’s first and best-known online communities wrote, “Democracy is under threat. The blame can’t ultimately go to the internet or to computer-aided automation or to artificial intelligence. The vast power of personal and corporate wealth to wield these technologies in support of their selfish interests will increasingly suppress egalitarian and democratic values.”

A research scientist for a U.S. federal agency wrote, “We are in a period of growing isolationism, nativism and backlash that will weaken democracies around the world, and it will probably have reached a peak by 2030. Although technology and online dissemination of information will be a tool of information and disinformation, and it will be a tool of policing populations, the underlying economic and environmental shifts are mostly responsible for changes resulting in weaker democracies.”

A retired professor commented, “Corporations will have more power over employees and customers. This will be achieved as part of the ongoing corporate takeover of democratic institutions, which U.S. President Eisenhower warned of long ago. Technologies of identification and surveillance will expand in usage, eating away at the private sphere of social life. Social media will continue to reinforce strong social ties among family and friends while reducing the formation of the weak social ties among acquaintances that support intergroup cooperation necessary in a diverse society. Worsening climate and its consequences for health, agriculture and infrastructure will create increasing irrational forms of blame and global conflict. Global conflicts will include electronic and biological forms of aggression against the militarily powerful countries. More citizen backlash is to be expected, but will likely be directed against inappropriate targets. Societies as we know them will stumble from disaster to disaster, toward a massive die-off of our species. I hope I’m wrong. I would like to see our species survive with its democratic values intact. I have grandchildren. I would like their grandchildren to inherit a better world than the one that our present technocratic capitalist economy is racing toward.”

Anonymous respondents commented:

“The internet under capitalism will only serve the few, not the many, and democracy will weaken as a result. The problem is about competitive economic imperatives rather than technological affordances.”
“It’s not the technology that will cause the changes, but the systems and structures that create various tech.”
“The loudest voices will continue to be those that are heard. While the media may change, the elite will still run everything.”
“Technology companies and governments have incentives to avoid doing things to address the damaging ways in which internet platforms damage democratic institutions.”
“Power corrupts. Look at the tech giants today – manipulation and propaganda. They are elitists who think they know best.”
“The combination of big data and supercomputing power seems to be having a negative effect on democracy, and I see no signs that that can be effectively policed or regulated, particularly given the power (and data troves) of very large internet companies and of governments.”
“I do not believe that governments understand the tools, and they will fail repeatedly to regulate or organize them properly; I also do not have faith the private companies are democratic, and therefore they are apt to reinforce capitalism alone, not democracy.”

Diminishing the governed: Digitally networked surveillance capitalism creates an undemocratic class system pitting the controllers against the controlled

Charles Ess, professor of digital ethics, at the University of Oslo, said, “Democracy – its foundational norms and principles, including basic rights to privacy, freedom of expression and rights to contest and conscientiously disobey – may survive in some form and in some places by 2030; but there are many strong reasons, alas, to think that it will be pushed to the margins in even traditionally democratic countries by the forces of surveillance capitalism, coupled with increasing citizen feelings of powerlessness against these forces, along with manipulation of information and elections, etc. Not to mention China’s increasingly extensive exports of the technologies of ‘digital authoritarianism’ modelled on their emerging Social Credit System.”

There is simply no reason to believe that technology can strengthen democracy. Gina Neff

Rob Frieden, a professor of telecommunications law at Penn State who previously worked with Motorola and has held senior policy positions at the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said, “Technological innovations appear better suited for expanding government power versus improving the ability of individuals to evade surveillance. Across the entire spectrum of political ideology, national governments can justify increased budgets for ever-more-sophisticated surveillance technologies based on noble-sounding rationales, such as national security. Governments have little incentives and incur even fewer penalties when they fail to calibrate surveillance technology for lawful reasons. Innocent people will have reasonable privacy expectations eroded, particularly with technologies that have massive processing power and range coupled with an ambiguous mandate. Unless and until citizens push back, governments will use surveillance technologies to achieve goals beyond promoting national security. We risk becoming inured and numbed by ubiquitous surveillance, so much so that pushback seems too difficult and unproductive.”

Gina Neff, senior research fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, studying innovation and digital transformation, wrote, “There is simply no reason to believe that technology can strengthen democracy. Western democracies are grappling with the power from the increased concentration of financial capital and its response in the form of the rise of populism. Without attention to strengthening our core technology and communications infrastructure, those forces will continue to damage how people participate in – and indeed make – democracy.”

Zizi Papacharissi, professor of communication and political science, University of Illinois-Chicago, responded, “Our present system of governance supports strong capitalism/soft democracy. Until this balance is reorganized, to support soft capitalism/strong democracy, any technology we create will continue to underserve democracy. In short, the technology we have created was designed to generate profit, not to support democracy. It is possible to do both. We just have not designed it that way, however. By 2030, we will see a weakening of democratic and political processes facilitated by technology. This will happen not because there is something inherently bad or undemocratic about technology. It is because most technology is designed, implemented and/or deployed through mechanisms that support a strong capitalist model that was created centuries ago and needs to be updated in order to be compatible with contemporary societies, democratic and non.”

John Harlow, smart-city research specialist in the Engagement Lab at Emerson College, said, “Although there is rising anti-monopoly sentiment, 2030 is soon, and the dominant digital commons for speech (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) are likely to draw out (in the courts) any regulatory action to change their business models and/or practices. Currently, they are governed by algorithms designed to maximize ‘engagement’ time and thereby advertising revenue, and those algorithms have prioritized extreme content over accurate content (among other problems). This has enabled and supported the rise of the authoritarian far right the world over, and has destabilized faith and participation in democratic institutions and processes.”

An expert on online trust and identity active in the multistakeholder organizations that build and maintain the internet said, “Uses are shaped by social and economic factors that drive toward consolidation and control. Having created a prefect panopticon that maps every endpoint and every device on the network, and with the rise of middle-box collectors that use massive computing power to correlate identifiers, the end result will tilt toward command and control.”

An expert in socio-technical systems wrote, “Social media tech firms will continue to resist control and meaningful regulation in order to preserve their core business, aptly described by Shoshana Zuboff as ‘surveillance capitalism.’ The oligarchs, perhaps still aided by foreign interests, will continue to manipulate public opinion for their own benefit. Economic inequality will continue to increase, as will resentment, misdirected toward immigrants and the ‘elites.’”

An expert in human-computer design wrote, “The decay of democracy should be attributed foremost to capitalism itself, and thus only in a secondary way to technology. Capitalism seems overdue for major shock, enough so that predicting much of anything so far ahead as 2030 seems foolish. The present moment witnesses the close of a decade of ever-intensified distraction engineering.”

An expert in the law who previously worked for a U.S. government agency wrote, “Increasingly sophisticated marketing based on data and inferred data on every individual threatens to cross the line between persuasion and manipulation and coercion, and the First Amendment restraints on government will require a substantial degree of proof of coercion before the government will be able to intervene to safeguard individuals from clear overreaching. The threat of manipulation – and we saw the first signs of that in 2018 with the Cambridge Analytica fiasco – is real and growing. Whether industry or government can curb it is an open question. Industry of course has a conflict of interest – the more successful its manipulation is, the more money industry makes. And government has the restraints of the First Amendment that limit its role.”

[cyberspace as a venue for war, along with land, sea, air, space]

The problem with everyone having a megaphone is that we get drowned in more noise than useful information. Sam Adams

Emilio Velis, executive director, Appropedia Foundation, said, “The way user participation has been shaped by technological platforms for the past 10 years turned the power of decentralized information back to the big corporations, platforms and stakeholders. Or, even worse, it has weakened the capacity of individuals of action while maintaining a false perception that they have control.”

Peter Lunenfeld, professor of design, media arts and digital humanities, University of California-Los Angeles, and author of “Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine,” wrote, “Commercial platform-driven communication technologies like Facebook, Twitter and their eventual successors are unlikely to strengthen representative democracy in the coming decades of the 21st century. They may add ‘voices’ to the conversation, but they will be unlikely to support and sustain the 20th century’s dominant forms of successful democracies – those that designated representatives to debate and legislate on their behalf, from coherent parties that had established ideologies and platforms. What we are starting to see is the development of dialoguing ‘communities’ that mimic the give and take of true democratic action without offering actual power to its participants, like the Italian Five Star Movement, or the emergence of personality-driven, single-issue pop-ups like Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. Like Five Star and the Brexit Party, future political movements will use social media to offer the affordances of democratic dialogue without actually empowering participants to control or direct the movements. Social media technologies are creating skeuomorphs of democracies; they will have design attributes that look and feel democratic, but they will be authoritarian to the core.”

An anonymous responden t commented, “The degree of tracking of comments by individuals will increase dramatically in the future as DeepMind-style algorithms are applied to internet-based material. It will become much harder for people to make comments without knowing that their attitudes are being logged and accumulated by organisations of all manner, so there will be a reluctance to speak one’s mind. Hence ‘free speech’ will be constrained and thus the democratic process hindered.”

A distinguished professor of electrical engineering and computer science who is an expert in the future of communications networks at a U.S. university wrote, “Social media makes it possible to reach voters in targeted ways and deliver information from a distance that is tailored to specific goals, rather than fostering local community discussion and participation. The lack of privacy in internet service platforms, along with artificial intelligence and big data, now make it possible for candidates to identify and influence voters in ways that could not have been imagined only a few years ago. Without corrective action (such as new election rules limiting the use of private citizen information), these new capabilities could lead to increased political instability and possibly the breakdown of entire democratic systems. The U.S. appears to be the first such casualty in the Western world.”

Sam Adams, a 24-year veteran of IBM now working as a senior research scientist in artificial intelligence for RTI International, architecting national-scale knowledge graphs for global good, said, “The internet provides a global megaphone to everyone in that anyone can publish their opinions and views instantly and essentially for free. The problem with everyone having a megaphone is that we get drowned in more noise than useful information. This is even more problematic since interest groups from all sides have used their power and resources to amplify their own voices far above the average citizen, even to the point of effectively silencing the average citizen by burying their smaller voice under a landslide of blaring voices controlled by wealthy interest groups. Given the interest-driven news cycles and echo chambers of social media, only the loudest or most extreme voices get repeated. This further exacerbates the level of emotion in the public discussion and drives listeners to the extremes instead of more common ground. A democracy must fairly represent its people’s views if it is to succeed. And part of that fairness in this technology-dominant world must include balancing the volume of the voices.”

Philip Rhoades, a business futurist and consultant based in Australia, wrote, “The neoliberal, developed Western world is sliding into fascism as the world’s sixth mass extinction reaches its inevitable conclusion. As this ecological collapse and political regression proceeds, modern technology will mostly be used for suppression of the great majority of people/citizens. Some technology may help defend the populations against state suppression and terror, but its effectiveness will be minor in the greater scheme of things.”

David Noelle, professor and researcher into computational cognitive neuroscience, University of California-Merced, wrote, “In the U.S., policy and public opinion have been increasingly shaped so as to support powered interests rather than the interests of the people. Regulation is dismissed as a threat to our troubled economy, encouraging corporate powers to pursue dangerous short-sighted strategies for producing return for investors. The unrepresented have been all but muted by electoral processes designed to sustain those in power. The most influential technologies of our times have been designed to depend on large centralized infrastructure. Data drives many new innovations, and few are in a position to collect and aggregate extensive data on the people. The focus on technologies that depend on controllable infrastructure, whether privately held or manipulated by political powers, will strengthen the positions of those currently in power, increasingly limiting the ability of the people to demand democratic representation. Note that this opinion is not intended as a call to limit technology but as a cry to radically alter political and economic institutions so as to provide representation to all of the people. A more democratic system will produce more democratic technologies.”

Deirdre Williams, an independent internet activist based in the Caribbean, commented, “We are being taught that convenience is the most important priority. ‘Innovation’ is killing ingenuity. I would expect that over the next 10 years the pendulum will swing in the opposite direction, but it will take a while to repair the divide that has been (deliberately?) introduced between citizen and government, and to remind governments of their duty of care to all of the citizens.”

Giacomo Mazzone, head of institutional relations, European Broadcasting Union and Eurovision, wrote, “I don’t believe that internet platforms will be able to self-reform, despite all announcements and efforts shown. And so only a break-up solution or ‘publicization’ of the internet giants could change the future. The amount of power that has been transferred by citizens and by states to these actors that are not accountable to anybody (even to the U.S. government) is too big to think that they could renounce voluntarily. Do you remember ‘Sliding Doors’ – the 1998 movie with Gwyneth Paltrow as leading actor? The future could (in a 50/50 chance) go totally wrong or fantastically well. A digital interconnected society based on trust and respect of individual and human rights could be the next arcadia. A digital interconnected and mass-surveillance-oriented society based on exploitation of human weakness and on polarization of society could be the perfect implementation of the Orwell dystopia of ‘1984.’ The two futures are equally possible. It’s up to government and civil society to decide in which direction we shall go.”

Scott B. MacDonald, an experienced chief economist and international economic adviser, said, “The future has a very real potential to be a dark Orwellian place, transfixed between strong technology under the control of a few wealthy and powerful and the great unwashed masses made economically redundant by machines and waiting for their daily dose of Soylent Green. One big change is that people may no longer have to go and vote but vote from hand-held or implanted communications devices. If we are not careful technology will be a device for greater control, not democracy, much as in China. Facial recognition anyone?”

Estee Beck, author of “A Theory of Persuasive Computer Algorithms for Rhetorical Code Studies,” commented, “Unless Congress takes action and passes protective consumer legislation to limit private industry powers with technological growth, i.e., surveillance and privacy erosion, democratic institutions will face greater dangers from domestic and foreign threats, loss of trust among the American public and devaluation of private technological companies among the marketplace. The infrastructure of technology, with faulty programming that allows for penetration and deep hacks, the decisions made now with select leaders in technology companies driving pro-China surveillance growth, anti-U.S. and Mexico relations via border surveillance, marketing of biosecurity technologies and the eventual promotion of artificial intelligence consumer goods and services will divide the faith of the nation and leave the American public ill-trusting of Congress to take action for the public good.”

Matt Colborn, a freelance writer and futurist based in Europe, said, “I do not deny the potential for technology to strengthen or even revolutionise democracy. In fact, this is what I hoped for at the beginning of the revolution in the 1990s. However, from a citizen perspective, the new technology seems to me to have already reduced mental autonomy and the capacity for intelligent choice. Why? 1) Platforms like YouTube seem to be more appropriate for distributing propaganda and for involuntary brainwashing because of the algorithms used. 2) Extreme tribalism has also increased because of the ‘echo chamber’ nature of personalised media. 3) Government and corporations are demolishing any kind of privacy. Neurotech, where thoughts are read, is the ‘final frontier’ of this. The problem, too, is the toxic interaction between archaic authoritarian institutions, right-wing populism and new tech. These effects mean that democracy is diluted whilst a ‘surveillance’ state is strengthened and while deep tribal divisions are exacerbated. Although there are certainly counter movements to this, economic inequality is such that basically the rich and powerful are in a position to cash in on these developments and the rest of us are not. Those who want political innovation will find it tough in this environment.”

Democratic regimes could become less democratic from the misuse of surveillance systems with the justification of national security. Anonymous respondent

An artificial intelligence expert predicted, “‘Democracy’ is likely to be even more of an elitist endeavor by 2030 than it is now. Life is good if you’re a big corporation, but not if you’re an ordinary working-class citizen. Who has a voice in this world will depend even more on money and power. Civic technologists will first promise to save democracy with technology but then start charging for it after five years because ‘someone has to pay for maintenance.’ And they will get away with it, because no one will remember that political rights are a basic right and not a commodity.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “Recently Hong Kong protesters had to buy single-trip transit cards with cash to be able to exercise democratic power; this will be impossible when mass face-recognition technology is implemented. Essentially, it is becoming almost impossible to behave democratically.”

“Technology is going to aggregate people’s individual voices and remove individual democracy.”
“Democratic regimes could become less democratic from the misuse of surveillance systems with the justification of national security.”
“I am sadly confident that democratic institutions will not be affected in any positive way in future by citizen’s perspectives; instead, technology will continue to create disenfranchised, disempowered citizens.”

Exploiting digital illiteracy: Citizens’ lack of digital fluency and their apathy produce an ill-informed and/or dispassionate public, weakening democracy and the fabric of society

James S. O’Rourke IV, a University of Notre Dame professor whose research specialty is reputation management, said, “As Neil Postman wrote in 1985, ‘We no longer engage in civil public discourse. We are simply amusing ourselves to death.’ Among the more insidious effects of digital life has been a reduction in tolerance for long-form text. People, particularly the young, will read, but not if it involves more than a few paragraphs. Few among them will buy and read a book. News sites have discovered that more people will click on the video than scroll through the text of a story. Given how easy it now is to manipulate digital video images, given how easy it is to play to people’s preconceptions and prejudice, and given how indolent most in our society have become in seeking out news, opinion and analysis, those who seek to deceive, distract or bully now have the upper hand. Jesuits have long cautioned that ‘No man can understand his own argument until he has visited the position of a man who disagrees.’ Such visits are increasingly rare. The long-predicted ‘filter bubble’ effect is increasingly visible. People will simply not seek out, read or take time to understand positions they do not understand or do not agree with. A sizeable majority now live with a thin collection of facts, distorted information and an insufficient cognitive base from which to make a thoughtful decision. Accurate information is no longer driving out false ideas, propaganda, innuendo or deceit.”

Bernie Hogan, senior research fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, said, “Technology without civics is capitalism with crystallised logic and unbounded scope. Democratic institutions and civic societies are premised on boundaries and intelligible scales, like the ‘local paper’ or the ‘provincial radio.’ Technology is allowing for the transcendence of scale, which we might think is great. Certainly, from a logistics and delivery side it is very impressive. But social cohesion requires levels of understanding that there’s a coherent bounded population to care about and define one’s identity through and against. It requires people seeing and doing things as more than consumers and occasional partisan voters.”

People don’t know what to believe, so they often choose either to believe nothing or to believe whatever their gut tells them. Research scientist

Larry Rosen, a professor emeritus of psychology at California State University-Dominguez Hills, known as an international expert on the psychology of technology, wrote, “I worry that many in the public will and do not have the skills to determine truth from fiction, and twisted truth can and does lead to misunderstanding the content.”

Carolyn Heinrich, professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University, said, “As internet content is increasingly customized for us by who we know and where we click, the range of information and perspectives we are exposed to will narrow unless we make the effort to read more widely ourselves. To minimize the negative effects, we have to proactively make the effort to broaden our circles of communication and sources of information/knowledge. As technology increasingly pervades our K-12 school curricula, we also need to examine exactly what technology vendors are conveying in their content, and who is the ‘face’ of that content in instructional videos. That is something we are currently investigating in our research .”

Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy and political science, Rutgers University, responded, “In the U.S. anyway, increasing political apathy has accompanied increasing use of technology. It has, on the one hand, been diversional from attention to matters of governance and citizenship. On the other, the centrifugal forces of interests made more available by increasing technology has eroded the core knowledge base of citizens, as well as the norms of citizenship. It does allow for mass movements to organize more quickly and put pressure on leaders, but the right-wing, post-recession populism and withdrawal from globalism is not, in my judgment, a good thing.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Unfortunately, fundamentally undemocratic processes in the United States, like the electoral college, will continue to be undermined by fake news and technology-backed manipulation of rural states, which have outsized electoral college voting power but typically lack education and will likely remain vulnerable to such exploits.”

A fellow at a major university’s center for internet and society wrote, “I am worried that the ease with which hostile powers and trolls can manipulate public opinion will only increase and become more sophisticated, leading to voters having increasingly lower levels of factual information at their disposal or, worse yet, increasing apathy toward or cynicism about voting and the democratic process entirely.”

Eric Royer, assistant professor of political science, Saint Louis University, said, “The breakdown of norms creates an environment of false truths that is directly tied to political polarization, especially among the fringes, and citizen mistrust and apathy with anything ‘government.’ Technology, especially in social media platforms, holds unlimited potential to make the world less of an unfamiliar place, however, its manipulation and influence in our daily lives is truly misunderstood at the current expense of democratic processes and institutions globally and domestically.”

A research scientist focused on fairness, transparency and accountability in artificial intelligence said, “The rise of fake news and manipulated media like deepfakes has sown a greater distrust of media and institutions that is undermining democracy, leading to a less-informed and less civically engaged population. People don’t know what to believe, so they often choose either to believe nothing or to believe whatever their gut tells them. Moreover, foreign actors that use social media manipulation tactics to sway elections further undermine democracy’s legitimacy.”

Continuous media weakens people’s ability to seek information and form their own opinion. Gretchen Steenstra

Mark Andrejevic, associate professor of communications, University of Iowa, wrote, “Much of my career has been built around my profound concerns about the impact that technology is having on democratic processes of deliberation, public accountability and representation. This is because technology needs to be understood within the context of the social relations within which it is deployed, and these have been conducive to privileging an abstract consumerist individualism that suppresses the underlying commitment to a sense of common, shared or overlapping interests necessary to participation in democratic society. I see the forms of hyper-customization and targeting that characterize our contemporary information environment (and our devices and mode of information ‘consumption’) as fitting within a broader pattern of the systematic dismantling of social and political institutions (including public education, labor unions and social services) that build upon and help reproduce an understanding of interdependence that make the individual freedoms we treasure possible. Like many, I share concerns about rising political polarization and the way this feeds upon the weaponization of false and misleading information via automated curation systems that privilege commercial over civic imperatives. These trends predate the rise of social media and would not have the purchase they do without the underlying forms of social and civic de-skilling that result from the offloading of inherently social functions and practices onto automated systems in ways that allow us to suppress and misrecognize underlying forms of interdependence, commonality and public good. I am not optimistic that anything short of a social/political/economic disaster will divert our course.”

Carlos Afonso, an internet pioneer and digital rights leader based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, wrote, “Thinking here of a planet with 7 billion-plus persons, most of them (including many of the supposedly ‘connected’) are unable to discern the many aspects of disinformation that reaches them through traditional (entrepreneurial) media, social networking apps and local political influences.”

A longtime CEO and internet and telecommunications expert commented, “Citizens will increasingly act absent of any understanding of critical analysis and reasoning, fact-checking or even rule of law. Under the guise of ‘acting out against injustice’ we will continue to see cyber vigilantism, whereby social media firestorms effectively ‘try and convict’ anyone accused of word or deed not supportive of their values.”

Gretchen Steenstra , a technology consultant for associations and nonprofit organizations, wrote, “I am concerned about higher velocity of information that does not include all critical and supporting information. Data is used to inform one view without context. Consumers do not fact-check (on many issues regardless of party). Americans are not focused on social responsibility or downstream impacts – they only want instant results. Continuous media weakens people’s ability to seek information and form their own opinion. Constant connectedness prevents reflection and allows your brain to relax. No one can argue with the desire for understanding.”

A fellow at a think tank’s center for technology and innovation wrote, “Democracy will be driven by more artificial intelligence systems, which will automate a range of decisions. Consequently, individuals may have limited input into their own decisions because data will be extrapolated from machines. What this will mean is a looser connection to democratic processes or connections driven by what one sees, hears and senses through dominant platforms. Without some level of policy restraint when it comes to specific use cases, such as voting, technology may serve to erode public trust, while simultaneously relying less on actual public input due to the level of sophistication that emerging technologies offer.”

Ayden Férdeline, technology policy fellow, Mozilla Foundation, responded, “Technology will continue to be exploited by those who seek to increase political apathy and undermine our trust in established institutions. This may happen more subtly than in the past, but the corrosive effect on democracy will be just the same.”

The internet amplifies trends that have been with us for a while – extremism and apathy. Pamela McCorduck

Philip J. Salem, professor emeritus, Texas State University, expert in complexity of organizational change, said, “People will become increasingly more careful about how they use the internet. Each person must be more mindful of use. My concern is that reflexive, non-mindful reactions can spread so fast and have more tragic consequences with the speed of the internet.”

Jeff Johnson, a professor of computer science, University of San Francisco, who previously worked at Xerox, HP Labs and Sun Microsystems, said, “Today’s social media encourages the spread of unverified information, which can skew policymaking and elections. People tend to be lazy and do not even read most of the articles they comment on, much less check the truth of the articles. In the TV era, before social media, putting out false information about a political opponent or ballot measure was expensive and subject to laws against ‘false advertising.’ Political hit pieces had to be well-funded, vaguely worded and carefully timed (to just before the election) in order to sway elections. That is no longer true. Strong regulation of social media could perhaps mitigate this, but such regulation seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.”

Pamela McCorduck, writer, consultant and author of several books, including “Machines Who Think,” said, “I am not sanguine about democracy right now. The internet amplifies trends that have been with us for a while – extremism and apathy. Our proportion of potential voters who actually vote only rose once or twice in the past few elections. Mostly it is dismal. Partly this is a result of voter suppression (not just removing voters from the rolls, but also making the process of voting far more cumbersome than it needs to be). Partly this is the realization by voters that elected officials are more beholden to dark money than to the people who elected them. I hope I am wrong about the future of this country I love.”

Luis German Rodriguez, researcher and consultant on knowledge society and sociotechnical impact based at Universidad Central de Venezuela, commented, “Democracy is likely to be weakened by 2030. … Authoritarian rule seems to be growing stronger wherever you look, supported by the emerging technologies.”

“People will not use the internet to research the issue, rather, they will simply go with whatever biased opinion is put in front of them.”
“The problem is that with the erosion of critical-thinking skills, true journalism versus opinion journalism (and the prevalence of ‘sound bites’ in lieu of serious debate based on facts) lack of proper policy and governance principles, these tools are being used to spread false information.”
“The public made more gullible by a short attention spans, eroding reasoning skills, becomes a malleable target for those who seek to erode the fundamental institutions of our democracy.”
“I’m less concerned about technology than I am the ability and willingness of my fellow citizens to educate themselves about the sources of information they consult.”
“The biggest threat to democracy is people’s lack of critical-thinking skills to be able to distinguish between information and misinformation.”

Waging info-wars: Technology can be weaponized by anyone, anywhere, anytime to target vulnerable populations and engineer elections

Richard Bennett, founder of the High-Tech Forum and ethernet and Wi-Fi standards co-creator, wrote, “The economic model of social media platforms makes it inevitable that these tools will do more harm than good. As long as spreading outrage and false information generates more profits than dealing in facts, reason, science and evidence, the bad guys will continue to win. Until we devise a model where doing the right thing is more profitable than exploiting the public’s ignorance, the good guys will keep losing. … One hypothetical change that I would like to see would be the emergence of social media platforms that moderate less for tone and emotion and more for adherence to standards of truthfulness and evidence. Making this approach succeed financially is the major obstacle.”

Mutale Nkonde, adviser on artificial intelligence at Data & Society and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, wrote, “Without significant regulation, our future elections will be ruled by the parties that can optimize social media recommendation algorithms most effectively. In the present moment, those are parties like Cambridge Analytica who used fear, racism and xenophobia to influence elections across the world.”

Eduardo Villanueva-Mansilla, associate professor of communications at Pontificia Universidad Catolica, Peru, and editor of the Journal of Community Informatics, said, “The lack of agreement about how to deal with these issues among governments is a serious threat to democracy, as much as the potential for misuse of technological innovations. In the next decade, the complete control by a few multinational firms will be completely outside of regulatory and policy reach of developing countries’ governments. This will increase the instability that has been normalized as a feature of governance in these countries.”

This is not like armed revolution; this is small numbers of employees able to affect what thousands, if not millions, see. Rich Salz

An expert in the ethics of autonomous systems based in Europe said, “Digital devices provide more and more new means to enhance the power of leaders to control people and to manipulate an inferior substitute for democracy to their benefit. They simulate and broadcast false flavours of democratic representations to the population. Decisions that restrict people’s rights, autonomy and freedom are promoted as necessary for enhancing the security, care and well-being of the population, while in fact the purpose is to protect the interests of those who seek power and influence. New digital means (biometrics, facial recognition, big data, deep learning, artificial intelligence) allow those in power to recognize and to profile people (position, behavior, location, ways of thinking, ideas, political opinions, level of life, health, origins, money, social relationships and so on). Stakeholders can use these devices to make appropriate decisions concerning what they consider subversive people and moreover to fight them if necessary. Robots and autonomous AI systems will be very efficient slaves to help to educate people who will not fit the requirements and rules imposed by the dominant class. This model will be developed in more and more states in the world and will progressively narrow freedom and decrease the quality of life of ordinary people belonging to medium and low social classes. At the same time, the field of available jobs will be more and more narrow because AI and robots will replace human beings in most areas and lead the majority of people to be unable to find means to work to support and fulfill themselves.”

Larry Masinter, internet pioneer, formerly with Adobe, ATT Labs, Xerox PARC, who helped create internet and web standards with IETF and W3C, said, “Traditional democracy and democratic institutions rely on geographically defined boundaries for constituencies. Enabling technology will accelerate the rise of cross-jurisdictional malfeasance, whether it’s called collusion or something else.”

An anonymous respondent warned, “Authoritarians will weaken checks and balances, turn courts into extensions of those in power and thus undermine representative democracy – enabled by the manipulation of digital media to stoke fear and mask inconvenient truths. … Extreme partisanship is putting all of our democratic institutions at risk to the point that shared power and orderly transitions may not exist in 10 years. Civil unrest seems inevitable.”

Rich Salz, senior architect, Akamai Technologies, wrote, “Individual citizens cannot stand up to the organized ‘power’ of other countries. This is not like armed revolution; this is small numbers of employees able to affect what thousands, if not millions, see.”

Heywood Sloane, entrepreneur and banking and securities consultant, said, “The current U.S. administration is leading the way to misuse technology. It permeates the public air with disinformation and lies, while putting a heavy hand on the scale in the background. It welcomes trolls to conferences in the White House and encourages them. Even if the administration changes it will take time and work to undo the damage. Media technology corporations have lost control of their platforms and marketing staffs – witness Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Already we have rogue state sponsors altering our dialogues, yet we ignore them and chortle away with their leaders.”

An associate dean of research for science and engineering said, “Over the next 10 years, we will see an increase in the current trend of using technology to further engineer elections (including gerrymandering) and to target those most vulnerable to manipulation (on all political sides). A result is overrepresentation in elected government of self-interested minority points of view (extremes on many sides), increased obstacles to ousting parties from power (especially in two-party systems like the U.S.), and, for a while at least, the continued divisiveness of political discourse.”

A consultant who works for U.S. government agencies said, “The biggest fear of technology will be the use of artificial intelligence. While at present we have control of AI, in time we will lose that control. As systems are augmented with AI, it will remove the human element over time. We can say what we like about technology and our control of technology, but in time external forces will replace the human element. This will happen in all areas of technology, including the governmental technology world. At some point it will go beyond its own programing doing what it believes is in our best interest.”

Sowing confusion: Tech-borne reality distortion is crushing the already-shaky public trust in the institutions of democracy

The leader of a technology innovation group at one of the world’s top five technology organizations wrote, “Technology has already and will continue to place huge strains on democracy. First, digital technology makes it immensely easy for a small number of leveraged actors to exercise great control over our public discourse. We see this as they exercise control over the information made available and presented to citizens. Second, digital technology makes it immensely easy for actors to hide or obscure their involvement and their intent. Third, digital technology makes it immensely easy to erode truth through fabrications or amplifications.”

Hate, polarization, oversimplification and lack of well-considered thought are and will be on the increase. Alejandro Pisanty

Nigel Cameron, president emeritus, Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, said, “I fear deepening distortions in public perception by the leveraging of digital media on the part of governments (our own and foreign), tech corporations and other actors – as new technologies like fake video make it even easier to shape opinion. It will be some time before (assuming it happens) we have the will and the tech to rein in these abuses. As things stand, partisanship by politicians and the ‘sorry, not sorry’ approach of Mark Zuckerberg and the other tech leaders portend deepening problems.”

[Technology]

Alejandro Pisanty, professor at UNAM, the National University of Mexico, and an activist in multistakeholder internet governance, wrote, “Hate, polarization, oversimplification and lack of well-considered thought are and will be on the increase. They are orders of magnitude easier to construct and propagate than the ways of countering them (the ‘bullshit asymmetry’ principle, on steroids). Manipulation of elections and other processes will continue to be rife as long as there exist those who want to do it and those susceptible to manipulation. Among the hardest hit will be the U.S., which has a gullible population unable to see the meta-layers of attack they are subjected to. There is hope for improvement in a smaller, smarter, more-democratic sector of society fighting the acritical reactions of the naive and uneducated. Better information, resilient systems (by design) and deliberations nested at all levels from the ultra-local to the global, an architecture of multistakeholder deliberations and decisions, and a lot of luck, may lead to improvement. Otherwise splintering and other forms of dark days loom.”

Rich Ling, professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; expert on the social consequences of mobile communication, said, “The forces that want to confuse/undercut legitimate information are learning how to best use these systems. They are also learning how to calibrate the messages they send so as to enhance their divisiveness. This division plays on confirmation bias and, in turn, undercuts the common ground that is needed for effective governing and democracy.”

Karl Auerbach, chief technology officer, InterWorking Labs, active in internet design since the early 1970s, had less faith in multistakeholder organizations, writing, “Democracy is dying at the hands of a concept called ‘stakeholder.’ This has little to do with technology except that people are being led to believe that they are not skilled enough or smart enough to decide for themselves, that technological experts ought to decide on their behalf. We are moving toward not improved democracy (direct or indirect) but closer to an oligarchy of ‘stakeholders.’”

Glyn Moody, a prolific technology journalist, blogger and speaker based in Europe, said, “Lies propagate more easily than truth. It is proving far easier to use the latest technology to undermine the things we thought were safe and stable. It is proving very hard to counter that abuse of technology.”

A computing science professor emeritus from a top U.S. technological university wrote, “As artificial intelligence technologies are employed to create ever-more-realistic disinformation videos and as multiplication of software AI disinformation bots can be replicated and spread easily by individuals or small groups, more and more people will be fooled by disinformation, thus weakening our democracy.”

A professor of sociology at a major California university said, “Powerful governments and their allies are using technology to destroy the concept of a single, accepted truth. While not always succeeding in implanting particular beliefs in the minds of citizens and residents, the constant assault on truth leads to fatigue and resignation, that the actual truth cannot be known, or that all political actors are equally bad. This resignation, moving into apathy, allows those in power to behave badly and centralize their power. The wild card is whether new technologies can detect bots and fake video/audio, and whether mainstream media and social media companies behave responsibly to bring an accepted truth back to life.” Alan Honick, project director for PROSOCIAL, said, “My work is focused on the need to make the internet and associated information technologies trustworthy and reliable. … The most important variable for the question at hand is whether or not information technology can move in the direction of becoming a trusted and reliable source of information, and at present the trend seems to indicate not.”

Annemarie Bridy, professor of law specializing in the impact of new technologies on existing legal frameworks, said, “Social media platforms have a steep hill to climb over the coming years when it comes to dealing effectively with disinformation and coordinated inauthentic behavior aimed at manipulating voters and electoral outcomes. Viral disinformation online will continue to be a serious threat to democratic institutions and the integrity of elections.”

Garth Graham, a longtime leader of Telecommunities Canada, said, “The digital age is characterised by a disintermediation of authority. Authority as a principle for structural organization is disappearing. Democracy is predicated by the agreement to accept authority to represent. Most people are no longer willing to accept that anyone else can represent them.”

Stephanie Fierman, partner, Futureproof Strategies, said, “Many parties have an incentive to issue false and damaging statements and content that people believe. Until we return to a world in which a fact is a fact is a fact, we will see a continuing degradation of truth and the existence of checks and balances, both of which being so vital to the presence of democracy.”

Stuart Umpleby, retired professor of management and director of research at George Washington University, commented, “The operators of social media platforms, such as Facebook, need to take responsibility for content. Otherwise they benefit by distributing falsehoods.”

Viral disinformation online will continue to be a serious threat to democratic institutions and the integrity of elections. Annemarie Bridy

Satish Babu, founding director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software, said, “If the world does not recognize the pitfalls and take corrective action, technology is likely to adversely impact the quality and practice of democracy. In particular, the pragmatics of democracy will deteriorate into an ‘anything goes,’ free-for-all fight where artificial intelligence will be used to dig up or magnify or even create antecedents of candidates from historical records and social media will be used to push such ‘facts’ to every citizen.”

A professor of sociology and public policy wrote, “Bot armies and databases of persuadable people that include information on what sets them off empower the worst nationalistic and international actors to tear down democracies. Via technology, people can enter alternate realities where others reinforce their fantasies and strengthen them – flat earthers, those who believe in vaccine and climate conspiracies, moon landing hoaxers and so forth. These are problematic in their own right, but also lend themselves to further manipulation, destruction of trust in institutions, scapegoat seeking, and the rejection of science.”

Filippo Menczer, a grantee in the Knight Foundation’s Democracy Project and professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, said, “Technology … mediates our access to information and opinions. This will in part strengthen democracy, for example making it easier to check facts. It will also weaken democracy, as vulnerabilities due to the interplay of cognitive, social and algorithmic biases continue to be exploited and new ones are discovered. On balance, my prediction is that things will get worse before they get better. We are only just beginning discussions about the legal implications of countermeasures, for example the issues related to social bots, disinformation campaigns, suppression of speech and the First Amendment in the U.S.”

Nancy Heltman , manager of a state agency based in the U.S., wrote, “The negative aspects of bots and influencers driving opinions are likely to outweigh the positive aspects of increasing involvement in the political process.”

David Gans, musician, songwriter and journalist, said, “I fear that deliberate falsehoods will continue to crowd objective reality out of the discourse. The social networks seem neither able nor particularly willing to intervene on behalf of the truth, and there are powerful and well-funded entities with a strong interest in misinforming the public.”

A research leader for a U.S. federal agency said, “Working to be respectful of First Amendment rights while not allowing the perpetuation of mis- or disinformation is of critical concern. I don’t expect that to be resolved within the next 10 years. We are living in the times of 50 shades of gray. In many cases, the determination is not black and white. The headline may be misleading, but not entirely untrue. I think that’s appealing to the media right now.”

Kenneth R. Fleischmann, associate professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas-Austin, wrote, “Technology will have complex effects on society that will be difficult to predict, that depend on the decisions of tech companies, governments, the press and citizens. … Trust will be key, not just blind trust, but trust based on transparent provenance of information that can help users exercise their autonomy and agency.”

“Technology will weaken our ability to come to consensus; by nurturing smaller communities and fringe ideas, it will make compromise and finding a modus vivendi much more difficult.”
“Social media will continue to erode faith in facts and reason; echo chambers and emotion-driven communications plus security problems in voting will undermine public discourse and faith in elections.”
“There seems to be no realistic way to check the effects of IT on polarization and misinformation. The true beliefs and actions of political leaders will continue to have decreasing influence on voting.”
“Foreign countries and hate groups will grow more sophisticated in their ability to infiltrate the web with biased stories and ads designed to suppress or sway voters and negatively impact public opinion.”
“While it enables voices to be heard, tech has already weakened democracy by enabling governments and corporations to erode privacy and silence those who might otherwise speak out.”
“We don’t need mass armies anymore. New technology enables centralized control to a degree never imagined before.”
“In 2030, there will still be splintering and increased political polarization as individuals are able to challenge democratic ideals and influence political processes through anonymous activities.”
“Democracy is, and will always be, filled with fake news and preposterous bloviation.”

Weakening journalism: There seems to be no solution for problems caused by the rise of social media-abetted tribalism and the decline of trusted, independent journalism

Christopher Mondini, vice president of business engagement for ICANN, commented, “The decline of independent journalism and critical thinking and research skills resulting from easy reliance on the internet make citizens more susceptible to manipulation and demagoguery. A growing proportion of politically active citizens are digital natives with no recollection of life before social media became the primary medium for debate and influence. The pursuit of clicks, retweets and page views encourages extremist or provocative rhetoric. Viral memes and soundbites distract from thoughtful analysis, deliberation and debate. Of course, the vast majority of citizens are not politically active, but they increasingly consume news and adopt a worldview shaped by their online communities. Participation in political processes may rise because of newly inflamed passions brought about by online discourse, but they may crowd out more measured voices.”

Yaakov J. Stein, CTO, RAD Data Communications, based in Israel, responded, “Social media as they are at present have a polarizing effect that destabilizes democracy. The reason is that advertising (and disinformation) is targeted at and tailored to people according to their preexisting views (as predicted based on their social media behavior). This strengthens these preexisting views, reinforces disparagement of those with opposing views and weakens the possibility of being exposed to opposing views. The result is that free press no longer encourages democracy by enabling people to select from a marketplace of ideas. Instead the right to free press is being used to protect the distribution of disinformation and being manipulated to ensure that people are not exposed to the full spectrum of viewpoints. Perhaps an even more insidious result is that people attempting to keep open minds can no longer trust information being offered online, but that free information online has led to the bankruptcy of traditional news outlets that spend resources on fact-checking.”

The decline of independent journalism and critical thinking and research skills resulting from easy reliance on the internet make citizens more susceptible to manipulation and demagoguery. Christopher Mondini

Rey Junco, director of research at CIRCLE in the Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University, said, “We can expect that attempts to influence public perceptions of candidates and elections are not only ongoing, but that they will continue to be successful. Technology use by citizens, civil society and governments will first weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation before there is a restructuring of technological systems and processes that will then help strengthen core aspects of democracy. There are two issues at play: 1) Ideological self-sorting in online spaces that is bolstered by algorithmic polarization and 2) The relative unwillingness of technology companies to address misinformation on their platforms. Individuals who get their news online (a larger proportion who are young – Pew Research ) choose media outlets that are ideologically similar and rarely read news from the opposing side (Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2018). In fact, these individuals are rarely exposed to moderate viewpoints (Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2018). Social media, in turn, allow for not just informational self-sorting as with online news, but such self-sorting is bolstered through algorithmic curation of feeds that promotes ideological separation. … Although major technology companies are aware of how misinformation was promoted and propagated through their networks during the 2016 elections and resultant congressional hearings on the topic, little has been done to mitigate the impact of such deliberate spreading of misinformation. Analyses from the security and intelligence communities show that state actors continue their attempts to manipulate public sentiment in social spaces, while the increased polarization of traditional outlets has minimized the impact of these reports. State actors are emboldened by the fact that the United States has not addressed the spread of misinformation through technological change or through public education.”

An associate professor of computer science who previously worked with Microsoft, said, “I worry about three related trends: 1) the increasing decentralization of news generation, 2) the lack of easy-to-use, citizen-facing mechanisms for determining the validity of digital media objects like videos and 3) personalization ecosystems that increase the tendency toward confirmation bias and intellectual narrowing. All three trends decrease the number of informed voters and increase social division. Governments will eventually become less averse to regulating platforms for news generation and news dissemination, but a key challenge for the government will be attracting top tech talent; currently, that talent is mostly lured to industry due to higher salaries and the perception of more interesting work. Increasing the number of technologists in government (both as civil servants and as politicians) is crucial for enabling the government to proactively address the negative societal impacts of technology.”

Kenneth Sherrill, professor emeritus of political science, Hunter College, said, “When I’m pessimistic, I believe that the fragmentation of information sources will interact with selective attention – the tendency only to follow news sources that one expects to agree with. This will generate even greater polarization without any of the moderating effects and respect for democratic processes that come from genuine participation. This can lead to the collapse of democratic processes. Right now, I’m pessimistic. The 2020 election may be the test.”

Eric Keller, lecturer in international relations and U.S. foreign policy, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, wrote, “Social media will heighten the current strong polarization that we already have. This is mainly from ‘information stovepipes’ and mutually reinforcing narratives that demonize the opposition. This creates the danger of democratic institutions being degraded in the name of ‘saving’ them from the opposing political party.”

A Europe-based internet governance advocate and activist said, “If current trends continue, there won’t be a real democracy in most countries by 2030. The internet’s funding model based on targeted advertising is destroying investigative journalism and serious reporting. More and more of what is published is fake news. Citizens cannot make informed decisions in the absence of reliable information.”

The coordinator of a public-good program in Bulgaria wrote, “By 2030 we will still see fighting between small groups and communities that leads to extremes. This will give ground to governments to become more authoritative and build up even stronger control via the internet.”

Bill D. Herman, researcher working at the intersection of human rights and technology said, “The combination of news fragmentation, systematic disinformation and motivated reasoning will continue to spiral outward. We’re headed for a civil war, and the hydra-headed right-wing hate machine is the root of the problem.”

An internet pioneer and technology developer and administrator said, “The foundation of democracy is an informed public. By undermining the economic foundation of journalism and enabling the distribution of disinformation on a mass scale, social media has unleashed an unprecedented assault on the foundation of democracy. The decline of newspapers, to just highlight one downside, has had a quantifiable effect (as measured in bond prices) on governmental oversight and investor trust.”

A professor and expert in learning in 3D environments said, “The explosion in the volume of information has led to the majority of people tending to rely on or trust the major platforms to filter and distribute information rather than managing their own personal learning environments with feeds from trusted independent sources. … As the filtering mechanisms become more sophisticated and more personalized to the individual, the opportunities for the wealthy to manipulate opinion will become even greater. The democratic system depends fundamentally on free access to reliable information, and once this is gone the system will effectively become less and less democratic.”

Mike Douglass, an independent developer, wrote, “Facebook sold people on the idea that a race to accumulate ‘friends’ was a good thing – then people paid attention to what those ‘friends’ said. As we now know, many of those ‘friends’ were bots or malicious actors. If we continue in this manner, then things can only get worse. We need to reestablish the real-life approach to gaining friends and acquaintances. Why should we pay any attention to people we don’t know? Unfortunately, technology allows mis/disinformation to spread at an alarming rate.”

Eric Goldman, professor and director of the High-Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law, commented, “Our politicians have embraced internet communications as a direct channel to lie to their constituents without the fact-checking of traditional media gatekeepers. So long as technology helps politicians lie without accountability, we have little hope of good governance.”

Janet Salmons, consultant with Vision2Lead, said, “The internet, with unregulated power in the hands of commercial entities that have little sense of social responsibility, will continue to unravel Western-style democracies and civic institutions. Companies profiting from sales of personal data or on risky practices have little self-interest in promoting the kinds of digital and advanced literacy people need to discern between fact and fiction. In the U.S., the free press and educational systems that can potentially illuminate this distinction are under siege. As a result, even when presented with the opportunity to vote or otherwise inveigh on decision-making, they do so from weak and uninformed positions. The lowest common denominator, the mass views based on big data, win.”

A researcher and teacher of digital literacies and technologies said, “In the early internet days, there was a claim it would bring a democratization of power. What we’re seeing now is the powerful having larger and more overwhelming voices, taking up more of the space rather than less. This leads to polarization, rather than a free-flowing exchange of ideas. Anyone falling within the middle of a hot issue is declared a traitor by both sides of that issue and is shamed and/or pushed aside.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “Increased engagement is largely a product of the media environment, and – in places where the press is absent, restricted or has become blatantly politicized – that engagement will bear the marks of a distorted information environment.”

Responding too slowly: The speed, scope and impact of the technologies of manipulation may be difficult to overcome as the pace of change accelerates

The core concepts of democracy, representation, elections and tenure of government will be greatly undermined by artificial intelligence. Emmanuel Edet

Kathleen M. Carley, director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University, said, “Disinformation and deepfakes in social media as well as the ability of individuals and media-propaganda teams to manipulate both who is and can communicate with whom and who and what they are talking about are undermining democratic principles and practice. Technological assistants such as bots, and information tools such as memes, are being used in ways that exploit features of the social media and web platforms, such as their prioritization rules, to get certain actors and information in front of people. Human cognitive biases, and our cognitive tendencies to view the world from a social or group perspective, are exploited by social media-based information maneuvers. The upshot is that traditional methods for recognizing disinformation no longer work. Strategies for mitigating disinformation campaigns as they play out across multiple media are not well understood. Global policies for 1) responding to disinformation and its creators, and 2) technical infrastructure that forces information to carry its provenance and robust scalable tools for detecting that an information campaign is underway, who is conducting it and why do not exist.”

Jason Hong, professor of Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, said, “Basically, it’s 1) easier for small groups of people to cause lots of damage (e.g., disinformation, deepfakes), and 2) easier for those already in power to use these technologies than those who need to organize. In the early days of the internet, new technologies empowered new voices, which led to a lot of utopian views. However, we’ve seen in recent years that these same technologies are now being used to entrench those already in power. We see this in the form of targeted advertising (being used for highly targeted political campaigns), analytics (being used for gerrymandering), disinformation and fake news (being used both domestically and by foreign powers, both unintentionally and intentionally) and filter bubbles where people can seek out just the information that they want to hear. All of this was possible before the internet, but it was harder because of natural barriers. We also haven’t seen the political effects of deepfakes and are just starting to see the effects of widespread surveillance by police forces.”

Mark Raymond, assistant professor of international security, University of Oklahoma, wrote, “Over the next 30 years, democracy faces at least three kinds of technology-based risks. First, actual or apparent manipulation of voting data and systems by state actors will likely undermine trust in democratic processes. Second, social media manipulation (by states and by political campaigns and other nonstate actors) will compound echo chamber effects and increase societal polarization. Decreased trust will heighten social conflict, including, but not limited to, conflict over elections. Third, ‘deepfakes’ will undermine confidence even in video-based media reports. Taken together, there is the risk that these trends could increase the willingness of voters to accept fundamentally authoritarian shifts in their politics. Absent that, it is still likely that increased polarization will make the operation of democratic systems (which are heavily dependent on mutual acceptance of informal norms) incredibly difficult.”

Emmanuel Edet, legal adviser, National Information Technology Development Agency, Nigeria, said, “The core concepts of democracy, representation, elections and tenure of government will be greatly undermined by artificial intelligence. The use of social media coupled with faceless artificial intelligence-driven opinions can manipulate popular opinion that will deny people the right to express their choice for fear of going against the crowd.”

Matt Moore, innovation manager at Disruptor’s Handbook, Sydney, Australia, said, “The issue is not that essential democratic institutions will change, it is that they will not change enough. Elections, voting, representatives, parties – none of these things will go away. They may mean more or less (likely less) than they used to. The number of democracies in the world is likely to decrease as weak or destabilised states fall into authoritarian populism. Western democracies will continue to age and grow more economically unequal. States like China will continue to grow in power, often using new technologies to control their populations. Everyone is talking up the potential of blockchain for democracy. This is mostly nonsense. The issue is not that people do not have the opportunity to vote enough. It is that no one really knows what that vote means. Many of those who vote – or rather, who do not vote – have no sense of what their vote means. Many of those who are voted for, also do not know what that vote means – which is why they rely on polling and focus groups. Deliberative democracy offers a potential new form of political engagement and decision-making – if (and this is a big ‘if’) it can be made to work beyond isolated experiments.”

Mike O’Connor, retired, a former member of the ICANN policy development community, said, “There is cause for hope – but it’s such a fragile flower compared to the relative ease with which the negative forces prevail. ‘A lie can get around the world while truth is getting its boots on’ – pick your attribution.”

A longtime technology journalist for a major U.S. news organization commented, “Our laws and Constitution are largely designed for a world that existed before the industrial age, not to mention the information age. These technologies have made the nation-state obsolete and we have not yet grasped the ways they facilitate antidemocratic forces.”

Hume Winzar, associate professor and director of the business analytics undergraduate program at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, said, “Corporations and government have the information and the technology to create highly targeted messages designed to favour their own agendas. We, as citizens, have demonstrated that we rarely look beyond our regular news sources, and often use easily digested surrogates for news (comedy shows, social media). We also seem to have very short memories, so what was presented as a scandal only a year ago is usual, even laudable, now. … None of this is new. The British and the U.S. have been manipulating foreign news and propaganda for many decades with great success, and the church before them. But now the scale and the speed of that manipulation is perhaps too great to combat.”

Ian Fish, ICT professional and specialist in information security based in Europe, said, “I expect the imbalance of power between the major global corporations and democratic national governments will increase to the detriment of democracy. I also expect non-democratic governments’ disruption of democratic norms to increase faster than the democracies can react.”

Puruesh Chaudhary, a futurist based in Pakistan, said, “Democracy needs to develop the capacity to negotiate in the interest of an ordinary citizen, who may not have direct influence on how key decisions play out in geopolitics but is invariably affected by it. The democratic institutions have to have systems that operate at the pace of technological advancements that have an impact on the society.”

Trust suffers when people’s infatuation with technology entices them away from human-to-human encounters

Several respondents argued there were circumstances when humans’ “slowness” was an advantage, but that technology was thwarting that side of life. They believe that a major cause of the loss of trust is the fact that many people are spending more time online in often-toxic environments than they spend in face-t0-face, empathy-enabling non-digital social situations.

Angela Campbell, professor of law and co-director, Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University, said, “We are just seeing the beginning of how technology is undercutting democracy and social relations necessary to a democratic society. We don’t have good ways of telling what is true and what is false, what is opinion and what is fact. Most people do not yet understand how power technologies (especially combined with a lack of privacy protections) allow them to be manipulated. In addition, as people spend more time using technology, they spend less time interacting with other people (in person) and learning important social skills like respect and empathy.”

Yves Mathieu, co-director at Missions Publiques, Paris, France, responded, “Technology creates new forms of communications and messaging that can be very rough and divisive. Some contributors are rude, violent, expressing very poor comments, insulting or threatening elected citizens. There will be a strong need for face-to-face format, as the technologies will not allow process of deliberation. There will be need for regular meetings with voters, in meetings where people will have the time and the possibility to exchange arguments and increase their understanding of each other’s position. Being associated with media, this will reduce the divide that we know today, as it will increase mutual understanding.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “The expanded use of technology with respect to the democratic processes will tend to weaken one of the most important aspects of democracy and the democratic processes – the use of technology instead of person-to-person dialogue seriously degrades (or removes altogether) meaningful dialogue and exchange of ideas between individuals. When individuals use technology to express their political views/opinions instead of having direct human interactions, these views tend to be more extremely stated than if that person is speaking a view/opinion to another person. Also, in many cases, if someone else expresses a different view from what the original individual expressed, the first person is much less likely to pay any attention to a view expressed using technology than if that view were expressed in a person-to-person discussion. Additionally, the increased use of technology for analyzing segments of society to ‘shape’ delivery of messages for particular segments will result in an increase of messages that distort the reality of the message or distort the results of what the message is describing.”

The future will include a complex interplay of increased online activity but also increased skepticism of those virtual interactions and an enhanced appreciation of offline information and conversations. Melissa Michelson

A futurist and consultant said, “Democracy currently has a crisis in global leadership. Without significant change in 2020, for which I am hopeful, I can’t hold a lot of hope for democracy in 2030. I’m afraid the question is not what will change, but what must change. Without changes in democratic institutions, the future of democracy itself is in question. There is an urban/rural split at work in tandem with a severe disparity in the distribution of wealth – with climate change overshadowing it all. Technology will have a hand in providing as well as impeding solutions.”

Arthur Asa Berger, professor emeritus of communications, San Francisco State University, commented, “People who use Facebook are affected in negative ways by a ‘net effect,’ in which they exhibit impulsivity, grandiosity, etc., as explained in my book, ‘Media and Communication Research Methods’ (Sage). Some young people text 100 times a day and never talk on the phone with others, leading to a radical estrangement from others and themselves. The internet is used by hate groups, neofascists, right-wing ideologues, terrorist organizations and so on.”

An anonymous U.S. policy and strategy professional said, “Technology allows the creation of a bullying environment that polarizes people to the point at which they do not attempt to understand other opinions or views, weakening public discourse and driving outrage and attacks on minority views.”

Japheth Cleaver, a systems engineer, commented, “At the moment, the major social media networks function not by neutrally and dispassionately connecting disparate communicators (like the phone system), but are designed reinforce engagement to sell as many targeted ads as possible. This reinforcement creates resonant effects throughout a society’s culture, and in-person contextual interaction drops away in favor of the efficiencies that electronic communication offers, but without any of the risk of the ‘bubble’ of the like-minded being dropped, as that would hurt engagement. Internet as communications overlay is fine. Internet as a replacement for public space seems detrimental.”

Melissa Michelson, professor of political science, Menlo College, and author, “Mobilizing Inclusion: Redefining Citizenship Through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns,” said, “The future will include a complex interplay of increased online activity but also increased skepticism of those virtual interactions and an enhanced appreciation of offline information and conversations. As more adults are digital natives and the role of technology in society expands and becomes more interconnected, more and more aspects of democracy and political participation will take place online. At the same time, the increasing sophistication of deepfakes, including fake video, will enhance the value of face-to-face interactions as unfiltered and trustworthy sources of information.”

“Unless there is transparency, tech will be the new digital atomic bomb – it has moved faster than individuals’ or the law’s understanding of its unintended consequences and nefarious uses.”
“At the current rate of disregard and lack of responsibility by those who own and run large tech companies, we are headed toward a complete lack of trust in what is factual information and what is not.”
“Public institutions move slowly and thoughtfully. People doing nefarious things move more quickly, and with the internet, this will continue to challenge us.”
“It is the personal and social norms that we’re losing, not the technology itself, that is at the heart of much of our problems. People are a lot less civil to each other in person now than they were just a few decades ago.”
“More access to data and records more quickly can help citizens be informed and engaged, however more information can flood the market, and people have limited capacity/time/energy to digest information.”

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Young Indian woman using mobile phone at the bar

In some ways, the digital age can be seen as beginning with the release of Apple’s iPhone in 2007. It is hard now to recall that someone as wise as Clayton Christensen said at the time of its release that the iPhone “wasn’t truly disruptive.” It was “a product that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat,” and that “its probability of success is going to be limited.”

Five years later, in 2012, Christensen was still saying that the iPhone would soon succumb to price competition and modular knockoffs. “History,” Christensen said, “speaks pretty loudly on that.”

Nine years after that, in 2021, and trillions of dollars more in profits, the iPhone is still going strong. What Christensen missed was that Apple had created not just an industrial-era product, but a digital platform, in which developers kept coming up with fresh innovations—known as apps—that customers would love so much they would hesitate to quit for anything less. Apple’s competitors weren’t just competing against a firm or product: they were competing against Apple and its army of app developers.

Whether Apple took an unseemly share of the platform’s profits at the expense of its developers is currently being litigated . But the game is long over for competitors. Almost all of Apple’s competitors, except Samsung, were obliterated.

What Christensen missed was that the iPhone wasn’t just a phone. It was a multi-function device that devastated a whole array of products and services , including address books, video cameras, pagers, wristwatches, maps, books, travel games, flashlights, dictation recorders, music players, timers, alarm clocks, answering machines, yellow pages, wallets, keys, phrase books, transistor radios, personal digital assistants, dashboard navigation systems, remote controls, airline ticket counters, newspapers and magazines, directory assistance, travel and insurance agents, restaurant guides, pocket calculators, and more.

Best Travel Insurance Companies

Best covid-19 travel insurance plans.

Christensen’s “loud lessons” from the history of industrial-era competition, in which one firm’s products compete against another’s, don’t apply to firms that are innovating in accordance with principles of the digital age. In the digital age, competition doesn’t work in an orderly fashion with phone companies competing against other phone companies. It’s not just that the rules of the game have changed. An entirely new game is being played. In this new game, innovation can transform almost any product and disrupt the dynamic of industrial-era competition.

A Car Is No Longer Just A Car

In the digital age, a car can shift from being a static mechanical transportation device to a dynamic entertainment and business center on wheels that continues to evolve, long after the original purchase, as software updates are streamed to the user over many years.

Thus, Tesla is now setting up a platform that could be as seductive as Apple’s iPhone. This is why the market capitalization of Tesla is almost as much as the other car companies combined— firms which sell many millions more cars than Tesla. Tesla is not just making a car. The stock market believes that Tesla has a good chance creating a continuously innovating platform that will be difficult to compete against. Accordingly, it values Tesla astronomically.

Figure 1: Auto industry: millions of cars sold vs market capitalization

Note that it isn’t just new technology that creates this new kind of product. Technology is part of it. But it also requires a different kind of management. It needs an obsession with delivering fresh value to customers, in which software engineers are at least as important as mechanical engineers—a fundamental shift in the corporate pecking order of the traditional car company. Both sets of engineers have to collaborate on the common goal of creating value for customers.

A Restaurant Is Not Just A Restaurant

Similar anomalies are emerging in the restaurant sector. The world’s leading pizza firm—Domino’s—is a winner in industrial-era terms, with almost-2,000% growth in market capitalization over 10 years. Over several decades, Domino’s has defeated its long-time rival, Papa John’s , to become the dominant pizza shop, world-wide, with some 270,000 establishments.

But long term, Domino’s real long-term competitor may be a newcomer like DoorDash , which has just three establishments. DoorDash doesn’t prepare food. It delivers food from many restaurants. By end 2020, its platform served 450,000 merchants, 20 million consumers, and more 1 million deliverers. It already has a market capitalization three times that of Domino’s, as shown in Figure 2. Domino’s chance of being one of the long-term winners in the digital era will depend on besting firms like DoorDash. That in turn will depend as much on data as it does in making pizzas.

Figure 2: Restaurants Domino's DoorDash

Ironically, Domino's Pizza is one of the few firms to implement a successful digital transformation , with exemplary customer interaction. Domino’s problem is the limited array of products it offers, compared to the multiple restaurants that DoorDash is offering. The risk is that, over time as with Amazon, customers may gravitate to a single source for all of their restaurant delivery needs.

Insurance Is Not Just Insurance

Similarly, in the industrial era, an insurance policy was just an insurance policy. In the digital age, an insurance policy can become something very different. With car insurance for instance, in firms like the international insurer, Progressive Corporation , an insurance policy is not just a financial contract. It can become an interactive relationship in which the car owner collaborates with the firm to reduce risk and lower costs.

Thus, drivers can save money on their car insurance by sharing their driving habits with Progressive. Progressive is then able to lower rates for people who drive less, in safer ways, or during safer times of day. Customers can also check their driving data, make changes to their driving habits and obtain bigger discounts. The result is a win-win: good driving behavior is rewarded, the firm has a more attractive business, and society has safer roads.

How Digital Reinvents Everything

What we are seeing is that firms operating in the principles of digital age can take (almost) anything, that is slow, expensive, disagreeable, impersonal, or difficult to scale, and turn it into something that is quick, easy, personal, agreeable, cheap or free, and easy to scale.

It is not just the technology that makes it happen, although technology is a large part of it. It is also the very different management practices.

The industrial era was built on the technology of steam, oil, and electricity and the management practices of hierarchical bureaucracy.

Figure 3: Industrial era

The digital era has emerged through combination of new technology, particularly computers and the Internet, and different kind of management. Instead of hierarchical bureaucracy focused on internal efficiency and outputs, the digital era came of age once firms figured out the principles of business agility, with an obsessional focus on customer value, and doing work in teams as part of a network of competence.

Figure 4: How The Digital Age was born

Since the 2000s, the digital age has continued to evolve with both new kinds of technology (including the cloud, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and algorithmic decisions) and new kinds of management (including new business models, platforms, ecosystems, managing data as an asset.)

Figure 5: How the digital age has evolved

The result is an economic era, in which every business is being, or will be, reinvented.

And read also:

Why Mainstream Economists Miss Digital Innovation

Why Most Digital Transformations Are Failing

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Learning in the Digital Age

(3 reviews)

Tutaleni Asino, Oklahoma State University

Rebecca Bayeck

Wilmon Brown

Raymond W. Francis

Tammi Kolski

Kathy Essmiller

Cathy L. Green

Sarah L. Lewis

Corrine McCabe

Josephine Shikongo

Jose Fulgencio

Publisher: Oklahoma State University

Language: English

Formats Available

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Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Brenda Williams, Part-time Faculty, Lane Community College on 2/1/22

It covers a variety of topics but did not include a index or glossary. read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

It covers a variety of topics but did not include a index or glossary.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

THe content is accurate.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

It is up to date and should be easy to update again if needed

Clarity rating: 4

The abstracts are helpful at the beginning of each chapter

Consistency rating: 4

The layout and the header styles are consistent.

Modularity rating: 3

Some of the chapters are much longer than others but there is consistent use of headers. There wasn't much use of pictures or graphs.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 3

The book could do a better job of grouping chapters together.

Interface rating: 5

There weren't any major issues. I did notice the navigation was only at the top so I always had to scroll back to the top.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

I didn't see any insensitivities.

Reviewed by Asashia Martin, Adjunct Professor, American University on 12/22/21

There are a variety of topics to consider regarding learning within a digital age and this textbook does a thorough job elevating topics. The lack of comprehensiveness for this textbook happens because you will find that the author of an included essay will either stay at a surface level explanation or will move through theory, definition, and application within the essay.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

Due to the variety of topics that emerge as educators navigate learning within a digital age, the reader has a first-hand glimpse of what to expect and possible next steps. From elevating play, to financial literacy development, to digital literacy, the authors share both research and anecdotes for consideration when facilitating learning in a digital age.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The impact of a digital world is ever-present within today's classrooms. As the author states, we are presented with an opportunity to refine and elevate how we are impacted by the digital age as well as how we navigate it systematically to deepen learning.

Clarity rating: 5

There is a good balance between theoretical and practical language for both content and application strategies.

Some essays dive deeper into theory and application than others. Depending on the subject that the reader may feel most drawn to, they may not have a full learning experience themselves if they got a surface level essay in one area versus another.

Modularity rating: 5

Easy to read, content is accessible, essays can function as supplements to larger bodies of work around the essay topic.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The essays elevated within the text are varied and the feel is that you are jumping from topic to topic with a lack of connection between topics.

text is clear, easy to read, graphics are supportive and easy to understand

No grammatical errors found

Cultural Relevance rating: 2

Texts reads as "race-neutral," with lack of acknowledgment of the impact of navigating digital literacies across race and culture. The board game chapter speaks of "Africa" as if it's just one country, not an entire continent made up of multiple and nuanced societies. The podcasting chapter references Maslow, who stole his framework from the Blackfoot Nation. Navigating the digital age could be an equalizer within culturally responsive classrooms but this text lacks what is needed to support educators to do so.

Reviewed by Youxin Zhang, Instructional Designer, Kapiolani Community College on 11/2/21

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

It might be helpful to include one chapter focusing on learning theories (e.g., Cognitive Development, Behaviorism, Constructivism) and another one on learner styles/preferences/characteristics if the vision of this textbook is to understand learning and help learners/stakeholders learn how to learn in the digital age. What is covered in the textbook now seems too broad to be used as an intact piece for an instructional purpose. No index/glossary was provided. It might be helpful to add one.

Most of the content is accurate.

Content is recent. With the current setup, it should work well for the author to update the content when needed.

Clarity rating: 3

The abstract of each chapter is helpful to get a snap judgment of what the author attempted to deliver. But not every chapter has it following a consistent format within the same textbook. The text is easy to understand and follow. As a whole, the target audience is not clearly stated since it’s a textbook for people to use in the class.

Consistency rating: 2

The internal consistency within each chapter looks good. But the improvements could be made on the internal consistency between chapters. Learning in the digital age is a broad subject. Now, the textbook seems like a potluck containing different contributing pieces. The correlation between chapters is not explicit to tell. As a reader, I have to go to each chapter and read the abstract to do jigsaw puzzles on my own rather than reviewing the chapter names at a glance from the table of contents to draw a quick picture as a whole.

Some chapters have a fairly long length (e.g., 25 pages, single-space), the others do not. It might be helpful to reach a balance between chapters by informing the chapter authors about the word limit when calling out for book chapter proposals. The headings used in each chapter are helpful for navigation.

Definitely, some work can be done to improve the organization of this textbook. Since this textbook is a work-in-progress product, the organization of all chapters can be reconsidered when more chapters are coming in. For example, some chapters (e.g., Chapter 2) focused on K-12 settings, others related to higher education. It might be helpful to regroup these chapters based on some parameters (e.g., institution type).

Interface rating: 3

Navigation is good within this textbook. Just want to point out that some chapters contained content that is not ADA compliant. For example, a URL link is NOT descriptive and is used as hyperlinked text directly. Additionally, the images used in the chapters are not attributed to the original author in a proper manner and follow the same format.

The grammar looks good.

Not detect anything.

Introduction

Board Games and Learning: Why Care in the Digital Age?

Effective Instruction in Blended Learning Environments

Podcasting as a Mode of Motivation in Online and Blended Learning

Virtual Proctoring and Academic Integrity

Personal Learning Networks: Defining and Building a PLN

Digital Learners in the Workplace

Digital Literacies and the Skills of the Digital Age

Playful Approaches to Learning

The Digital Divide

Ignored Conversations: Higher Education Funding in the Digital Age

Literacy in the Digital Age: From Traditional to Digital to Mobile Digital Literacies

The Digital Divide and the Lack of Financial Literacy Among First Generation

Ancillary Material

About the book.

This book is designed to serve as a textbook for classes exploring the nature of learning in the digital age. The genesis of this book is a desire to use OERs in all my teachings, coupled with the realization that the resources that I was looking for were not available and as such I needed to contribute in creating them. It is thus a small attempt to contribute to the vast repository of Open Educational Resources. When discussing learning in the digital age, most focus on the technology first. However, the emphasis made in this book is that it’s about the learner not just the technology. One of the things that is easy to lose track of when talking about learning in the digital age is the learner. Technology is important and it has significant impact but it is still about the person who is using the technology. Many people conflate learning in the digital age with technology in today’s age. This important misconception is common and results from our failure to examine our understanding of what “learning” really is. Of course, Most of this depends on a person’s epistemology. There are numerous definitions of what learning is and often they come to how a person sees the world. Some argue that learning is about a change in behavior due to experiences, others state simply that learning is being able to do something new that you were not able to do before. Regardless of what side you choose, to understand what learning in the digital age is, one has to understand what learning itself is. I am immensely thankful to the authors for sharing their ideas freely and for the reviewers who volunteered their time to give feedback.

About the Contributors

Dr. Tutaleni Asino is an Associate Professor at Oklahoma State University. His areas of research revolve around diffusion of innovations in teaching and learning, mobile learning, design for mobile devices, indigenous knowledge, comparative international education, and the role of culture in the development and evaluation of learning technologies.

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Privacy in the Digital Age Essay

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As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Anonymity and the internet, anonymous servers, anonymous users, advantages and disadvantages of anonymity, controversies and responses.

Bibliography

Social, economic, and technological advances have dramatically increased the amount of information any individual can access or possess. Unfortunately, this has also brought about various challenges that must be addressed. Generally, information is a vital treasure in itself, and the more one has the better. Having valuable, intellectual, economic, and social information creates enormous opportunities and advantages for any individual.

Even though information is a treasure, it can also be a liability. Besides constantly seeking ways to acquire, keep, and dispose of it, users of information also want to make sure that what is seen and heard privately does not become public without their consent. In the present technologically advanced society, a number of factors have contributed to the high demand for information and hence the need for anonymity, security, and privacy.

Increased public awareness of the potential abuse of digital communication, especially the Internet is one major concern for all stakeholders. To a large extent, most Internet users are concerned about privacy and do not want all the information they send or receive over the Internet to be connected to them by name.

This paper presents arguments indicating that it is critical for governments to impose restrictions on Internet privacy. According to Kizza anonymity refers to the state of being nameless or having no identity.

Since it is extremely difficult for anybody to live a meaningful life while being totally anonymous, there are different types of anonymity that exist including pseudo anonymity and untraceable identity.

Pseudo anonymity is where one chooses to be identified by a certain pseudonym or code while untraceable identity implies that one is not known by any name.

For many people, anonymity is one of the biggest worries as far as using the Internet is concerned. The virtual world may make it easier for dissidents to criticize governments, for alcoholics to talk about their problems and for shy people to find love. However, anonymity also creates room for dishonest people to pose as children in chat rooms and criminals in order to hide from law enforcers.

As such, Internet anonymity seems to cut both ways. According to proponents, preserving anonymity on the Internet may be the cornerstone of safeguarding privacy and a vital part of the constitutionally protected right to free speech. Critics have, however, argued that online anonymity permits people to affect others and not be held responsible or accountable for their actions.

In general, the use of the Internet has created room for individuals to operate in secret, without anyone being able to tell who they are. In particular, the Internet provides two channels through which anonymous acts can be carried out. These are anonymous servers and anonymous users.

With advances in software and hardware, anonymity on the Internet has grown through anonymous servers. These may be full anonymity servers or pseudonymous servers. When full anonymity servers are used, it is impossible to identify the packet headers.

In the case of pseudonymous servers, pseudonyms are usually placed inside packet headers to conceal identity. In the process, the actual identity gets hidden behind a pseudonym and any packets received thereafter are relayed to the real server. Anonymity servers are able to accomplish this through the use of encryption.

Other options are also used to allow users to adopt false names to hide their identity as they use the Internet. With false names, they can proceed to use message boards or participate in chat rooms without being recognized by anyone.

This has sometimes led to sensitive or highly personal information being posted to user groups, news groups, and chat rooms. In addition, popular protocols are also used to provide anonymity to the users. Generally, these protocols accept messages relayed to servers with arbitrary field information.

To some extent, anonymity may be used to curb bad behavior and to warn culprits that they are being watched. This contributes greatly to ensuring that everyone in the organization behaves appropriately. Although whistle blowers are sometimes controversial, they are reliable in a number of occasions such as when there is abuse of office and resources. Secondly, anonymity can be useful to those in charge of national security.

It may be used by underground spies to gather useful information for national defense. Where there is intimidation and fear of punishment, anonymity may be used to reveal useful information. Anonymity is also good for strengthening relationships and the security of some people.

One of the disadvantages has to do with the fact that anonymity can make it easy for criminals and fraudsters to commit crimes. It can also make it difficult to access information that may be useful for settling disputes.

Anonymity, according to its defenders, is a right protected by the American Constitution. In a notable 1995 case concerned with the distribution of anonymous pamphlets, the Supreme Court noted that anonymity is some form of a shield for individuals. Enshrined in law or not, the power to remain anonymous is often taken for granted by members of democratic societies.

Many authors have written controversial works using pseudonyms, politicians comment confidentially using generic titles like a spokesperson, and one of the first principles of journalism is never to divulge the identity of an anonymous source. It is important to note that anonymity is central to free speech and free speech is central to democracy.

According to Lambert, anonymity can be a weapon that damages or destroys reputations. Defenders of anonymity are always concerned that the idea of anonymity on the Internet is regarded differently from any other kind of anonymity.

If the Supreme Court recognizes that anonymous books and leaflets are a justified form of free speech, the argument goes that Internet communication should be treated the same. Where anonymity is concerned, radio and television are treated differently from books because they are broadcast media.

They are not disseminated the same way and are harder to ignore. Although critics charge that Internet anonymity should be subject to special regulation, one of the basic premises of devising laws for the Internet is that they should be technologically neutral.

According to law enforcers, the Internet’s built-in anonymity makes it a safe haven not just for whistle-blowers and dissidents but also for criminals and terrorists. In November 2002, newspapers reported that the Pentagon had briefly considered and rejected an idea called e-DNA, which would have tagged natural Internet traffic with personalized makers.

Since human DNA is unique to every individual, DNA samples taken from crime scenes can often be used to trap criminals. In much the same way, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hoped that Internet traffic tagged with e-DNA makers would be traceable to individuals and their computers. Had the plan not been scuttled, it would have outlawed most forms of Internet anonymity.

However, if anonymity is a cornerstone for democracy, as proponents allege, it would seem to be worth going to some lengths to defend. Apparently, this would require more than passing laws to protect Internet users who want to remain anonymous.

Ultimately, the recognition of the different kinds of anonymity might be necessary, followed by the treatment of the various forms of anonymity in different ways, including legal protection for uses of anonymity that are not connected to criminal behavior.

It may also be necessary to come up with ways to distinguish between those hiding behind their anonymity to commit crimes and those using it for whistle-blowing purposes. The distinction will help organizations to determine if it is necessary to allow anonymity in a given situation.

Strangely enough, anonymity may be complicated or simplified through the Internet given that communication via the Internet happens secretly and determining a user’s identity can not be done with absolute certainty.

As has been discussed in this paper, anonymity has its good and bad side. If left unchecked, innocent individuals in the society will be subjected to undeserved suffering. In a number of cases, therefore, it is necessary either for a local authority or national legislatures to pass laws that regulate when and who can use anonymity legally.

In the current environment of the Internet, there are serious debates on the freedoms of individuals on the Internet and how these freedoms can be protected when dealing with people on the Internet under the cover of anonymity.

Kizza, Joseph. Ethical and Social Issues in the Information Age . Chattanooga, TN: Springer, 2010.

Lambert, Laura. The Internet: Biographies . Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2005.

Schwabach, Aaron. Internet and the Law: Technology, Society, and Compromises. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2006.

Whistle-Blowing and Leadership
Aspects of Social Behavior and Privacy
Bullying Through Social Media
Demonstrations and Protests
What Are Human Rights?
Media Ethics and Law – Free Expression
Immigrants and Human Rights
Oppression of Women’s Rights Affects the Economy of the Middle East
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Chicago (N-B)

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Writing Processes in the Digital Age: A Networked Interpretation

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First Online: 15 September 2023

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The concept of writing processes is clearly useful for the study of digital writing when we see writing as a complex, integrated set of actions that are organized in time and integrated into both digital and physical spaces. With the increased digitalization of writing, the processes of writing are becoming more integrated into a variety of tools, workspaces, and platforms, adding new layers to how we perform writing. This chapter explores how writers and researchers can conceptualize digital writing activities as new platforms and software continue to evolve, changing the way writers adapt processes to complex writing situations. The proliferation of digital spaces and tools also raises the visibility of writing processes formerly difficult to assess and evaluate due to their cognitive nature. This chapter will summarize primary approaches to writing processes and several heuristics currently used to understand and analyze writing as a dynamic and networked activity. These tools are useful for examining the new ways digital technologies make writing processes visible for both research and reflection. The chapter will also discuss some implications for theory, pedagogy, and research.

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Writing process

1 Introduction

The digitalization of writing has not only distributed writing activity across space but also across time, making writing processes more complex. The digitalization of the writing process highlights the adaptability and flow of writing activity, where each step can take place at any point in time and can occur independently or in relation to other actions within a variety of digital spaces. Because many of these activities now happen in new and developing platforms and tools, like those discussed in this book, processes are more accessible to both researchers and writers, increasing opportunities for research and innovation in the writing process. Though writing processes can be difficult to map, both researchers and writers can better reflect on writing activity as the use of digital tools becomes more ubiquitous throughout all the processes of writing.

In writing studies, process has always been shaped by the available writing technology and the historical and cultural contexts in which they exist and interact. How we think about process is often informed by not only shifts in technologies, but also in cultural movements. For example, the idea of a single writing process emerged from the industrialization of manufacturing and influenced all aspects of education, not just writing (Gee et al., 1996 ; Henry, 2006 ; Slack et al., 1993 ). The technologies available to researchers and scholars will ultimately shape how we construct the various activities and processes involved in writing. One goal of this book is to clarify these contexts to better understand writing processes, how they are changing, and how we can better reflect on how they function in complex writing situations.

This chapter will explore how researchers and writers can conceptualize writing processes in the digital age. To do so, the chapter will review primary approaches to thinking about writing activity and then look at how these processes are visible throughout the technologies discussed in this book. Both researchers and instructors will need to think about the ways these shifts alter how writers conceptualize and adapt writing activities as they become more distributed and complex.

2 Traditional Views of Writing Processes

Since its inception in the mid-twentieth century, writing studies has used the idea of writing processes to develop both research and teaching. The shift from final products to developing the skills and abilities required to produce texts revolutionized how we research and teach writing in academic contexts (Anson, 2014 ). Writing became no longer defined as a final product, but as a series of activities that take place in specific spaces and environments. Since the emergence of the process paradigm, scholars have viewed writing activity through various lenses, which are always historically situated and influenced by technologies.

Understanding the digitalization of writing means understanding how new technologies influence the way we frame the activities around the production of text. Since this paradigm shift, writing activity has often been understood as not only sequences, but also a collection of choices and social interaction.

Process paradigms	Theoretical focus	Dominant technology
Sequenced steps	• Final product • Linear connections • Editing & Polishing	Analog
Collection of choices/cognitive or mental models	• Revision • Recursivity • Reflection	Word Processing
Social activity	• Collaboration • Audience interaction • Participation	Web 2.0
Workflow	• Networked ecologies • Activity theory • Distributed tools	SaaS, CMS 3.0

Many of these concepts find their way into the newer approaches to writing processes in the digital age, even as we adapt to new technologies. The next few sections will detail these approaches and how they fit into the digitalization of writing.

2.1 A Sequential Set of Steps

The most basic view of writing sees process as a set of sequential or interrelated steps that lead to a final product, usually by an individual writer. These processes have been typically broken into six stages: planning or prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, reflecting, and publishing or sharing. How we explain these activities is often determined by the tools and spaces we use to make them happen (Bernhardt, 2013 ; Porter, 2002 ). For example, writing on paper or with a typewriter emphasizes the linear nature of writing, both as the generation of text and in the organization of ideas. This sequential view of the writing process emerged in the early twentieth century with the increased use of mass-production models in factories and schools. This model became the predominant definition of process during the 1960s and 1970s, when writing processes in schools and universities became an alternative to product-based writing instruction. Much of writing studies research into process is centered around researchers and teachers examining them as more dynamic and interconnected as new technologies become integrated into our writing.

Early on in the process movement, scholars cast writing as a sequential set of steps meant to help writers better develop their thoughts and rhetorical awareness. For example, Corbett ( 1999 ) organized the writing process around the canons of rhetoric to emphasize audience and purpose. Rohman ( 1965 ) conceptualized various stages in order to highlight writing activity underemphasized in research and teaching (like pre-writing). How writers plan and organize ideas became a key moment of intervention where teachers could improve student learning and thinking, while researchers could better understand how writers think by observing them, instead of just analyzing their texts (Perl, 1979 ). Because much of writing was analog at that time, many of these writing activities were invisible or underemphasized in the writing classroom. Researching writing processes helped bring important writing activities to the front of mind.

Approaching writing as process helped teachers and researchers look beyond the text itself to see how writing processes could be improved, taught, or simply understood. For example, the revising and editing stage became a key element in most writing classes. This stage involves making changes to a text to improve its clarity, coherence, and overall quality, but also helps writers develop meta-awareness of how their processes work. Emig ( 1977 ) made the case that writing processes and learning processes work together to help writers develop knowledge, not just communicate what they know. Writers’ own reflections and self-assessments on these processes can help students improve how they handle complex writing situations (Anson, 2000 ; Howard, 2000 ). This meta-awareness can lead to a better understanding of the choices writers make. As digital technologies became more available and connected, a greater emphasis was placed on the role of editing and revising digital artifacts. Revision becomes a key moment of intervention for teachers, particularly as working with digital technologies gives them clear visibility into revision history and allows for greater reflection on the choices writers make.

2.2 A Collection of Choices

In both teaching and research, tracking and analyzing writers’ choices became a key part of understanding writing activities as more dynamic. Before the advent of computers, access to the writer’s thought process was difficult to access, requiring lab-like observations and speak-aloud protocols (Flower & Hayes, 1977 ). Researchers have often been limited to the written text, with little access to the writer's thought process, as well as the environment and tools that the writer uses to create the text (Anson and Kruse, “ Plagiarism Detection and Intertextuality Software ”). With word processors and cut/paste tools, both writers and researchers could see more of the choices they make while writing, not just when revising or editing (Kruse & Rapp, 2019 ; Liu, 2011 ). As a result, writing processes are not just seen as a series of steps, but as a constant revision and repositioning of ideas, as well as the re-examination of values, purposes, and audience. New computer technologies encouraged a more recursive view of the writing process (Collier, 1983 ; Selzer, 1983 ). For example, writers can re-order, delete, and add elements to a text in ways that may not fit into a linear view of writing (Sommers, 1980 ).

As the field of writing studies grew, many scholars and teachers looked at writing processes as more than just communication, but a way of thinking and learning. Researchers like Flower and Hayes ( 1981 ) used process as a way to explore the thinking behind composing. Writing activities became a series of choices that writers make as they develop their ideas, not just their texts. Breaking down writing activities into these decision points allows scholars and teachers to focus on specific kinds of activities that cultivate ways of thinking. Flower and Hayes recast process into a more dynamic and iterative process focused on better understanding what criteria govern writer choices. Effective writers plan what they have to say, translate or communicate these ideas, then review and evaluate the result. Instead of a linear process, though, this model became a way to track writers’ choices and thought patterns.

This became one way to help writing teachers to increase student awareness of implicit expectations in academic writing, a common approach to first year writing classes in the university. Writing activities become opportunities for student reflection, often leading to increased awareness of how academic discourse works. Consequently, these opportunities provide teachers with an effective way of helping students increase their efficacy when composing complex text like academic essays and research papers. When combined with technology, tools, and feedback strategies, understanding writing processes as a series of choices creates more agency for individual writers as they enter into communities of discourse.

2.3 Social Activity

Ultimately, this led researchers and teachers alike to think about writing activity within more social contexts (Collins, 1995 ). Instead of focusing on individual learning and writing, researchers and instructors began to focus more on collaborative learning and peer feedback as an integral part of the writing process (Bruffee, 1999 ). Using technology to increase student agency, interaction, and collaboration became a way to open up academic discourse to more social approaches to knowledge-making, especially with the rise of more collaborative tools like Google Docs, wikis, and blogs (Bradley, 2014 ; Tzu-Ching Chen, 2012 ). This provides students with the opportunity to read and provide feedback on each other’s writing, while also interacting with audiences in-class and online, raising awareness of audience and purpose.

In many ways, understanding writing activity in more social contexts has encouraged researchers and teachers to go beyond the linear models of composing, understanding writing as more ecological and networked (Kent, 1999 ). This social turn in writing studies eventually led to a pushback against the writing process as a set of discrete steps that writers go through to complete a text. Writing is more than just a cognitive process or a series of individual choices (Cooper, 1986 ; McComiskey, 2000 ). Even so, postprocess arguments focus on the social nature of text, not on the social nature of the individual or invention process (Fraiberg, 2010 ). In short, producing text is not about following a set of pre-written rules, but a series of dynamic interactions between the writer and the world around them, which includes technology and the digital world.

Though not necessarily a central theme, composition’s social turn parallels the rise of more accessible technologies for writers like Web 2.0 and social media, where users participate in the creation of content (instead of passively consuming). Writers begin interacting with others in different ways, using a range of tools, platforms, and genres inside and outside the classroom. Social media networks (like Facebook) and Enterprise Social Networks, like (Slack and Microsoft Teams) become important spaces for brainstorming, exploring, and drafting (Cummings, 2016 ; Cummings et al., 2017 ). Even virtual reality expands how we understand social interaction around writing (DeWinter & Vie, 2008 ). Many new collaborative spaces, like digital whiteboards and collaborative mind mapping tools, are also changing how writers work together visually and across networks (Hewett, 2006 ; Lin, 2019). Going beyond the individual processes of writing, the social turn in composition studies helped focus writing activity as an act of making meaning with others.

Understanding these interactions opens up a multi-faceted understanding of the writing process that provides a richer picture of how writing works and an openness for adapting it to new environments and technologies that understand writing activity in more dynamic and socially situated contexts. With the growth of digital tools, writing processes are now seen as a series of choices within a complex network of individual and social activities that can be observed within a variety of contexts, both online and off. While the emphasis on observing individual choices is still important, writers are now seen to participate in broader social activities. Writing activities become networks of social exchange, with feedback and support from peers, teachers, and other writers essential to successful writing. In this way, writing activity no longer needs to be seen as a solitary activity, but instead a part of a collaborative and recursive process of meaning-making.

3 From Process to Workflow Models

The increasing digitalization of writing in this century creates even more possibilities for both exploring and adapting the writing process to new digital contexts, especially as writing activity is distributed through more networks, both human and digital. While there is still a great deal of research about how writing is done in digital contexts, most current scholarship takes a multiliteracies approach, or the idea that there are many different forms and processes of writing (Khadka, 2018 ; Selber, 2004 ). For example, computers networks have expanded the range of social and textual spaces writers can use to produce and share text, like blogs and wikis. Digital technologies have also facilitated alternative forms of writing activity that are social, corporal, and multimodal, often described as networked ecologies (Hawk, 2007 ).

This shift has led to what Lockridge and Van Ittersum ( 2020 ) call workflow thinking or a more ecological approach to understanding process. Lockridge and Van Ittersum re-articulate the writing process as workflow, or a set of malleable activities connected to specific technologies or tools used to accomplish specific tasks. This can be a useful way of understanding the digitalization of writing processes, which tends to de-articulate the notion of individual writers outside of space and shows how our consciousness as writers emerges from the activity and interactions around various tools, spaces, and people. In this sense, postprocess scholars were correct. Workflow is not a codifiable process. It is not a set of steps that run in more or less the same order. Rather, workflow is an activity that moves through various tools, apps, and physical spaces in different ways and at different times.

The workflow approach to understanding the writing process reframes the study of writing to include both the technological and social components of writing. Instead of a linear or discrete process, writers are now seen as engaging in a set of interconnected activities, drawing on multiple resources to produce texts. In this way, writing is not seen as a single process, but an ecology of activities, tools, and spaces. Theories and pedagogies about writing need to take into account how tools are used and integrated into the writing process in these complex networks. This understanding of writing processes has the potential to open possibilities and create more flexibility to respond to changes that come with new technologies and forms of communication.

3.1 Towards Networked Metaphors

One major influence of digital technology on writing is the development of more networked metaphors to explore collaborative and distributed forms of writing. The metaphors used to understand the writing process are moving beyond the written page, the book, and the office space (Heilman, “ The Beginnings of Word Processing: A Historical Account ”). As these metaphors shift, our assumptions about how text and knowledge are created will have to adapt. Researchers and teachers need to develop methods for understanding how this shift in knowledge production occurs, what it means for teaching, and how writers engage with these changes. Network metaphors map the complexities of digital writing onto the idea of interweaving threads, rather than circles or straight lines.

Instead of thinking about writing processes in discrete steps or choices, using ecologies as a metaphor can help writers and researchers identify how writers intertwine writing activities in digital spaces. For example, using mind maps or social annotation tools is not just a pre-writing exercise, but also can be an important part of the drafting or revision stage. These activities might occur in digital spaces, physical spaces, or some combination of the two. Here are some questions that might help think about how the various spaces and technologies in this book might interrelate:

How are different spaces and tools connected? What happens between these?

How do the various writing activities that comprise the writing process change and adapt within the various tools and spaces?

What kinds of physical spaces, environments, or infrastructures lie beneath the digital networks and technologies that now make up the writing process?

How do these ecologies change over time?

An ecological view of writing helps writers and researchers examine the writing process as an emergent set of activities that is dynamic and ever-changing. How we put together writing activities in changing environments is a more useful way to approach the digitalization of the writing process.

Lockridge and Van Ittersum’s workflow mapping can be a helpful way for writers and researchers to think about the writing process and how they may change in various technological and digital contexts. To better understand how a writing process can be tweaked, writers can map out the digital spaces and tools to see how workflows might be adapted. These maps are not meant for describing a static reality, but to provide a snapshot of a dynamic system with specific points of agency that can increase writing quality or efficiency using these primary questions:

What tasks make up the writing process, and how do they relate in space and time?

What technologies do writers use to accomplish the tasks on the map?

How does changing tasks, technology, or position benefit or influence the workflow?

How do writers shuttle between tools and platforms?

How do writers understand their activities?

What is the relation between inscription and revision?

These questions, along with workflow maps, are useful for a more holistic perspective at the digitalization of the writing process. Tinkering with apps and adjusting workflow is now an important part of the writing process, requiring both writers and researchers to think about how the writing process can be shaped and reshaped in different contexts.

3.2 Expansion of Invention

The proliferation of invention spaces within these complex networks allows writers and collaborators to linger longer in the invention stage and experiment in deeper ways (Kruse et al., “ Creativity Software and Idea Mapping Technology ”). The invention phase of the writing process can also expand to include other ideas writers might consider when making meaning, as well as new modes of knowledge creation. When students can experiment with other modes of inquiry, they also learn that writing is one way of making meaning, but not the only way.

New annotation and note-taking tools allow for easier capture of new ideas and more experimental approaches to organizing those ideas (Pitura, Digital Note-Taking for Writing ). As new tools become available, so do new forms of thinking and organizing knowledge. This includes new forms of understanding information, the ways in which we use new tools and technologies to think (Kruse & Anson, “ Writing and Thinking: What Changes with Digital Technologies? ”), and the ways in which we think about how we can best use the tools that are available (Anson & Kruse, “ Plagiarism Detection and Intertextuality Software ”).

Many of these tools also use various hypertext methods to connect text and ideas in different ways (Cummings, “ Content Management System 3.0: Emerging Digital Writing Workspaces ”; Lang & Baehr, “ Hypertext, Hyperlinks, and the World Wide Web ”). When writing is used as a means of exploration, writers learn that they have the power to control their own learning by linking ideas in new ways. Writers can actively choose how the information they consume in the classroom connects, even across disciplines and contexts. When writers are given the opportunity to build and revise their own learning, they are learning that there is always another way of thinking about a problem or concept (McKinney, this volume).

Even plagiarism detection might be considered a part of various writing activities invention and revision process, helping students understand intertextuality in its early forms (Anson & Kruse, “ Plagiarism Detection and Intertextuality Software ”). As the invention process expands in terms of media and modes of inquiry, there is an opportunity to create a learning environment where students see themselves as creators and not just consumers of knowledge. New media tools enable us to track and report plagiarism in much more detail and provide more complex analyses of source material than is possible with traditional document writing. In addition to reporting plagiarism, these tools enable more nuanced analysis of the relationship between student text and source material.

3.3 Increased Collaboration

One of the main advantages to writing in the digital age is that it allows for easier integration of writing with other content areas and learning activities (Hodgson et al., “ Social Annotation: Promising Technologies and Practices in Writing ”). Writing is often confined to a single classroom and a single teacher. New tools and technologies allow for a much more flexible and dynamic approach to writing and writing assessment. Though new writing platforms like OneDrive and Google Docs have increased collaborative options in the drafting phase (Castelló et al., “ Synchronous and Asynchronous Collaborative Writing ”), these affordances extend beyond writing production. The digitalization of the writing process allows for more tailored and idiosyncratic approaches to writing and invention, and collaborative tools have also increased opportunities for more social approaches to knowledge management, invention, and the writing process.

Social annotation tools, new note-taking tools, CMS 3.0 tools allow for more social approaches to knowledge management and invention … not just drafting (Cummings, Content Management System 3.0: Emerging Digital Writing Workspaces ; Pitura, “ Digital Note-Taking for Writing ”). These tools also provide new ways for instructors to involve themselves in the writing process (Hodgson et al., “ Social Annotation: Promising Technologies and Practices in Writing ”). Digital peer review platforms take this a step further, allowing instructors to systematize their feedback procedures in the classroom, even to the point of incorporating tutoring activities (Anson, “ Digital Student Peer Review Programs ”; Banawan et al., “ The Future of Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Writing ”). The digitalization of the writing process has also enabled new and previously impossible collaboration opportunities, going beyond just peer editing and review (Anson, “ Digital Student Peer Review Programs ”). They can share ideas, notes, and sources. As these tools become more common and their affordances become more socially understood, writers will begin to experiment with these tools in their own work.

3.4 Observing the Writing Process

With these new digital spaces, both writers and researchers will have more opportunities to observe and analyze writing activities that have not always been visible or emphasized in writing studies. Before the digital age, observing the writing process or workflows was difficult, requiring lab conditions or self-reporting. Writing is now increasingly visible through new and emerging tools and technologies, as described in this book.

Metrics such as time elapsed between drafts, the speed, duration, and intensity of text editing, and the amount and types of external sources consulted are all key metrics that can be tracked through new tools. Teachers can also use these tools to collect, organize and present documentation of writing activity for both research and student reflection. This can include the organization of writing artifacts like drafts, notes, and student portfolios (Bräuer & Ziegelbauer, “ The Electronic Portfolio: Self-Regulation and Reflective Practice ”). Similarly, the digitalization of the writing process has also made it easier to track types and sources of feedback, such as peer review, annotations, and comments (Anson, “ Digital Student Peer Review Programs ”; Hodgson et al., “ Social Annotation: Promising Technologies and Practices in Writing ”).

New digital tools, such as social annotation, note-taking and next-gen CMS technologies, also provide opportunities to observe and research the invention process in new ways (Hodgson et al., “ Social Annotation: Promising Technologies and Practices in Writing ”; Kruse & Rapp, “ Word Processing Software: The Rise of MS Word ”; Pitura, “ Digital Note-Taking for Writing ”). The use of automated plagiarism detection can provide a window into the ways students are incorporating external content into their writing (Anson & Kruse, “ Plagiarism Detection and Intertextuality Software ”).

New technologies will also help researchers organize and analyze larger, yet more detailed chunks of data. The digital availability of academic text, along with automated analytical tools, will allow researchers to more easily identify patterns in writing activity, not just in published journals, but in other spaces as well (Shibani, “ Analytic Techniques for Automated Analysis of Writing ”). Keystroke logging (Wengelin & Johansson, “ Investigating Writing Processes with Keystroke Logging ”) can help us observe how writers develop their writing not just in drafts, but in prewriting spaces like notetaking tools and emerging digital workspaces.

4 Conclusion: Future Developments

With the onset of digital writing, writing processes have become dependent on a variety of technologies and tools. We cannot assume that writing is still a consistent pattern of activities. The choices writers make are guided by individual decisions and the availability of tools. What works today may be outdated tomorrow, or what works for one content area may not work for another. In addition, new approaches to managing the digital writing process may require new types of hardware and services. Conventional word processors like Microsoft Word or Google Docs constantly add new functionalities which can be used optionally. All of these variables may make the process of adapting to and integrating new technologies into teaching, research, and writing more nuanced and difficult to define. Researchers and teachers must understand the technological tools available to writers and what is possible in these spaces to more fully understand the choices writers make.

Researchers should continue to think about how writers and technology work together co-constitutively to shape our writing workflows. Neither the technology nor the writer is in full control of the writing process; each shapes the other. Writers do not exist in a vacuum, but within a complex environment that is more and more digital, but never entirely so. But new technologies provide artifacts for the study of the writing process. The digitalization of the writing process means that we have access to a wider range of artifacts than ever before. We can now trace the evolution of a particular artifact over time and space and how writing is used by different people in different contexts. This suggests that writing is a complex, integrated set of actions, not just putting words together on paper or in a Word Doc.

As the visibility of writing activities increases in different ways, scholars should also think about what new aspects of the writing process might be accessible to research, while also thinking about what elements of the process are still hiding. For example, keylogging makes self-editing more available for research, but perhaps makes rhetorical choices less visible in the research process.

In this contribution, I have explored the various ways in which the digitalization of the writing process is affecting the writer and the production of content. We have seen how writing tools and spaces are being redesigned to meet the needs of writers and how the design of these tools and spaces affect how writing is produced. The idea of a dynamic, technologically mediated writing process is useful when we see writing as a complex, integrated set of actions that are organized in time and integrated into both digital and physical spaces. Even a quick glance through the chapters in his books shows many opportunities for researching and reflecting on the writing process in new ways.

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Cummings, L. (2023). Writing Processes in the Digital Age: A Networked Interpretation. In: Kruse, O., et al. Digital Writing Technologies in Higher Education . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36033-6_30

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What is a book in the digital age?

Lecturer, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

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As a professional book designer , I’ve spent a decade observing electronic books from a cagey distance. A couple of years ago, I reluctantly recognised the need to engage with these alien book forms, both as a reader and a designer . It is the 21st century.

What I have come to realise is this: electronic books can do certain things that print books cannot, and therein lies their value. Enhanced electronic books are changing our definition and expectations of books.

My office, home and handbag are still stuffed with print books; eBooks (e for electronic) have not replaced pBooks (p for print) in my life. I find myself toggling between the two.

I consider the relationships between print and electronic books from the perspective of a reader and designer. What are these different formats, and how do they affect the way we produce and consume content?

The smell and feel of paper

Let’s get nostalgia out of the way quickly. Print books have a material quality that electronic books do not. For many of us, the intimacy of cradling a book close to our chest, hanging our head over it and shutting out the real world is a sacred ritual. The smell and feel of paper can never be replicated by a cold, hard screen.

Although it’s possible to read an electronic book in a bath, it’s less relaxing and more dangerous (not in a fun way). Browsing a bookstore or library and flicking through books is a social, embodied experience. Clicking on a screen is not.

Amazon.com has a complex algorithm to suggest books I may like based on previous purchases, but I’d rather have a librarian or bookseller make suggestions based on their expertise and a conversation, and walk out holding the book object. The tactile differences between page and screen will always be an issue for those of us raised on ink and paper.

But watch how a toddler tapping stubbornly at a magazine becomes annoyed that the image isn’t changing. That child is unlikely to feel the same nostalgia for print as her parents, because her understanding of “book” will be significantly different to theirs.

The technology we use to present and consume information has changed. The toddler who understands that tapping a glassy surface should make an image change demonstrates that technology is developing at an unprecedented rate, and unless we are constantly attentive we risk being left behind.

New tech, new challenges

Although often linked, anxiety about the new is different than nostalgia for the old.

A print book is a beautifully simple technology to use. Pick the thing up, turn each leaf in sequence until finished. If literate, anyone can pick up and read any print book.

An electronic book is a more complex technology. An eBook requires a computer, eReader or tablet, and a power source to keep the device charged. It requires computer access to a website or digital catalogue where files can be downloaded, and an understanding of how to use it.

Pages aren’t just turned, they are clicked and pinched and swiped – movements that need to be learned, and vary between different devices and brands.

In other words, you need new kinds of literacy to even get to the text. Moreover, you need to keep up with constant development and updating of these devices and programs, and understand the value and limitations of different devices, formats and suppliers.

This market-driven mess is the major issue with current eBooks. Different eReaders are made by different companies – Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and the Sony Reader, to name a few. Then there are tablets, such as Apple’s iPad, which perform a range of functions similar to a computer, one of which is enabling users to read eBooks through an app (short for “application”, or computer program).

These different devices run on different software, and require different file types. An eBook that works on a Kindle may not work on an iPad. There is no single file type that allows an eBook to be published all devices.

So although cutting out the printing and binding process of traditional book production may seem to reduce production time and costs, the confusion of designing for different platforms and devices means an entirely new and more complicated production process has been introduced.

Urgency to capture the market means many of these devices and the software/programs on them are released before they have been properly tested, and have faults that need to be addressed by constantly updating to newer versions of the software.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire eReader, released just before Christmas 2011, was riddled with bugs and problems : volume-control glitches, an off-switch that was easily hit by accident, slow loading time and an unresponsive touch screen. Hundreds of articles and forums are dedicated to problems associated with iPads: overheating devices, Wi-Fi connectivity issues, slow charging, apps and eBooks refusing to sync or download.

This can seem overwhelming when you could just pick up a print book and begin reading immediately.

Yet the complexity of the digital system is what allows eBooks to do astounding things, and offers versatility and accessibility impossible in print.

More pros than cons

The most immediate appeal of eBooks for digitally-reluctant readers is the efficiency afforded by an eReader. Packing for a vacation, a single device the width of a novella that contains hundreds of books is incredibly convenient and offers a previously unimagined variety of instantaneous choice.

Travelling on the Trans-Mongolian Rail a few years ago, I constantly cursed the bulk of Anna Karenina. With an eReader, I could have slipped Tolstoy’s entire oeuvre into my jacket pocket, with some Dostoyevsky for good measure. Then again, finding a power source in a yurt would have proved problematic.

Other appealing aspects of eBooks are immediacy and variety. Incredible numbers of eBooks, including many that are difficult to find in print, are available instantly from repositories, with no delivery time, and with many at a lower cost than print books.

The US-based online literary archive Project Gutenberg has more than 42,000 free eBooks – digitised books that have fallen out of copyright.

Most publishers offer new releases in both print and electronic editions simultaneously. These eBooks are direct translations of print books; the same text is scanned in, or typeset for an eReader, exactly as it would appear in the print edition. For those direct translations, the difference between a print and electronic edition is a matter of the reader’s preference. The content of the book is the same, only the format differs.

A richer reading experience

A more curious breed are “enhanced eBooks”, which include audio-visual and interactive elements such as short videos and animations.

UK company Touch Press are leading that field. Their titles include an edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that contains a scanned draft of the manuscript hand-edited by Ezra Pound, an original video performance of the poem, and a suite of video interviews with poets, theatre directors and scholars discussing the cultural significance of the poem.

They have also produced an edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings that allows users to zoom at extraordinary resolution and compare Leonardo’s theories against modern knowledge with 3D models of human anatomy, as well as interactive demonstrations.

Touch Press is also behind an animated, annotated periodic table of elements that has to be seen to be believed. Their highly interactive release, Gems and Jewels, allows users to rotate the pictures within the books to see the other side.

Touch Press’ website manifesto reads:

Books are one of the defining inventions of civilisation. Today publishing is being transformed by digital technologies. The aim of Touch Press is to create new kinds of books that re-invent the reading experience by offering information that is enhanced with rich media and that adapts dynamically to the interests and experience of the reader.

These kinds of publications are different than the eBooks that are straight translations from print to digital. They include audio-visual and interactive elements that cannot be reproduced on the page.

These are the eBooks that are changing the way we consider what a book is, and could be.

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Reading in a digital age

By Naomi S. Baron | Sep 25, 2017 | Feature Article

Even millennials acknowledge that whether you read on paper or a digital screen affects your attention on words and the ideas behind them.What are the implications for how we teach?

The digital revolution has done much to reshape how students read, write, and access information in school. Once-handwritten essays are now word-processed. Encyclopedias have yielded to online searches. One-size-fits-all teaching is tilting toward personalized learning. And a growing number of assignments ask students to read on digital screens rather than in print.

Yet how much do we actually know about the educational implications of this emphasis on using digital media? In particular, when it comes to reading, do digital screens make it easier or harder for students to pay careful attention to words and the ideas behind them, or is there no difference from print?

Over the past decade, researchers in various countries have been comparing how much readers comprehend and remember when they read in each medium. In nearly all cases, there was essentially no difference between the testing scenarios. (See Baron, Calixte, & Havewala, 2017 for a review.) However, such findings need to be taken with a grain of salt. These studies have typically focused on captive research subjects, mostly college students who commonly are paid to participate in an experiment or who participate to fill a course requirement. Ask them to read passages and then answer SAT-style comprehension questions, and they tend to do so reasonably carefully, whether they read on a screen or on paper. Under those conditions, it’s not surprising that their performance would be consistent across platforms.

But the devil may lie in the details. When researchers have altered the testing conditions or the types of questions they ask, discrepancies have appeared, suggesting that the medium does in fact matter. For example, Ackerman and Goldsmith (2011) observed that when participants could choose how much time to spend on digital versus print reading, they devoted less to reading onscreen and had lower comprehension scores. Schugar and colleagues (2011) found that participants reported using fewer study strategies (such as highlighting, note-taking, or bookmarking) when reading digitally. Kaufman and Flanagan (2016) noted that when reading in print, study participants did better answering abstract questions that required inferential reasoning; by contrast, participants scored better reading digitally when answering concrete questions. Researchers at the University of Reading (Dyson & Haselgrove, 2000) observed that reading comprehension declined when students were scrolling as they read, rather than focusing on stationary chunks of text.

What about research with younger children? Schugar and Schugar found that middle grades students comprehended more when reading print than when using e-books on an iPad (Paul, 2014) — interactive features of the digital platform apparently distracted readers from the textual content. However, the same researchers observed that among K-6 readers, e-books generated a higher level of engagement (Schugar, Smith, & Schugar, 2013). Working with high school students in Norway, Anne Mangen and her colleagues (2013) concluded that print yielded better comprehension scores. Mangen argues that print makes it easier for students to create cognitive maps of the entire passage they are reading.

For educators, though, the real question is not how students perform in experiments. More important is what they do when reading on their own: Do they take as much time reading in both media? Do they read as carefully? In short, in their everyday lives, how much and what sort of attention do they pay to what they are reading?

Questions about reading in a digital age

History is strewn with examples of people worrying that new technologies will undermine older skills. In the late 5th century BC, when the spread of writing was challenging an earlier oral tradition, Plato expressed concern (in the Phaedrus) that “trust in writing . . . will discourage the use of [our] own memory.” Writing has proven an invaluable technology. Digital media have as well. These new tools make it possible for millions of people to have access to texts that would otherwise be beyond their reach, financially or physically. Computer-driven devices enable us to expand our scope of educational and recreational experience to include audio and visual materials, often on demand. But as with writing, it’s an empirical question what the pros and cons are of the old and the new. Writing is a vital cultural tool, but there is little doubt it discourages memory skills.

When we think about the educational implications of digital reading, we need to study the issue with open minds, not make presuppositions about advantages and disadvantages.

To help forward this exploration, my own research has been tackling three intertwined questions about reading in a digital age. First, what do readers tell us directly about their print versus digital reading habits? Second, what else do readers reveal about their attitudes toward reading in print versus onscreen, and what can we infer about how well they pay attention when reading in each medium? The third question is more broad-stroked: In the current technological climate, are we changing the very notion of what it means to read?

Students are more likely to multitask when reading onscreen than in print — especially in the U.S. where 85% reported multitasking when reading digitally, compared with 26% for print.

I’ve been investigating these questions for about a half-dozen years, beginning with some pilot studies in the U.S. (Baron, 2013) and continuing with surveys (between 2013 and 2015) of more than 400 university students from the U.S., Japan, Germany, Slovakia, and India. Participants were enrolled in classes taught by colleagues, or they were classmates of one of my research assistants. Everyone was between age 18 and 26 (mean age: 21). About two-thirds were female and one-third male. (For study details, see Baron, Calixte, & Havewala, 2017.) Though my study participants were university students, I suspect that most issues at play are relevant for younger readers who have mastered the skills we would expect of middle-school students and above. Use of digital technologies is now ubiquitous among both adolescents and young adults, and teachers at all levels are increasingly assigning e-books (or online articles) rather than print.

The study consisted of three sets of questions. In the first set, we asked students:

How much time they spent reading in print versus onscreen;• Whether cost was a factor in their choice of reading platform;
In which medium they were more likely to reread;
Whether text length influenced their platform choice;
How likely they were to multitask when reading in each medium; and
In which medium they felt they concentrated best.

In the next set, we asked what students liked most — and least — about reading in each medium. Finally, we gave participants the opportunity to offer additional comments.

Print versus digital reading habits

Here are the main takeaways of what students in the study reported in the first set of questions about their reading habits:

Time reading in print versus onscreen

Overall, participants reported spending about two-thirds of their time reading in print, both for schoolwork and pleasure. There was consider-able variation across countries, with the Japanese doing the most reading onscreen. In considering these numbers, especially for academic reading, we need to keep in mind that sometimes reading assignments are only available in one medium or the other, so students are not making independent choices.

More than four-fifths of the participants said that if cost were the same, they would choose to read in print rather than onscreen. This finding was particularly strong for academic reading and especially high in Germany (94%). Students (and for that matter, K-12 school systems) often cite cost as the reason for selecting digital rather than print textbooks. It’s therefore telling that if cost is removed from the equation, digital millennials commonly prefer print.

Not everyone in the study reread — either for schoolwork or for pleasure. Among those who did, six out of ten indicated they were more likely to reread print. Fewer than two out of ten choose digital, while the rest said both media were equally likely. Rereading is relevant to the issue of attention since a second reading offers opportunities for review or reflection.

Text length

When the amount of text is short, participants displayed mixed preferences, both when reading academic works or for pleasure. However, with longer texts, more than 86% preferred print for schoolwork and 78% when reading for pleasure. Preference for reading longer works in print has been reported in multiple studies. As Farinosi and colleagues (2016) observed, “If the text requires strategic reading, such as papers, essays, books, the paper version is preferred” (p. 417).

Multitasking

Students reported being more likely to multitask when reading onscreen than in print. Responses from the U.S. participants were particularly stark, with 85% indicating they multitasked when reading digitally, compared with 26% for print. The detrimental cognitive effects of multitasking are well known (e.g., Carrier et al., 2015). We can reasonably infer that students who multitask while reading are less likely to be paying close attention to the text than those who don’t.

Concentration

The most dramatic finding for this set of questions came in response to the query about the platform on which students felt they concentrated best. Selecting from print, computer, tablet, e-reader, or mobile phone, 92% said it was easiest to concentrate when reading print.

Paying attention to reading

Students provided open-ended comments to the second set of questions, which asked what they liked most and least about reading in print and onscreen. In these responses, students praised the physicality of print but grumbled that it was not easily searchable. They complained that reading onscreen gave them eyestrain but enjoyed its convenience.

They also had telling things to say about the cognitive consequences of reading in hardcopy versus onscreen. Of all the “like least” comments about reading digitally, 21% were cognitive in nature. Nearly all these comments talked about perceived distraction or lack of concentration. U.S. students were especially vocal: Nearly 43% of their “like least” comments about reading digitally concerned distraction or lack of concentration. When asked what they “liked most” about reading in print, respondents said, “It’s easier to focus,” I “feel like the content sticks in the head more easily,” “reading in hardcopy makes me focus more on what I am reading,” and “I feel like I understand it more [when reading in print].”

In their additional comments (the last question category), study participants wrote about how long it takes to read the same length text on the two platforms. One student observed, “It takes more time to read the same number of pages in print comparing to digital,” suggesting that the mindset she brings to reading print involves greater (and more time-consuming) attention than the one she brings to reading digitally. In fact, in an earlier pilot study, one student griped that what she “liked least” about reading hardcopy was that “it takes me longer because I read more carefully.”

Unexpectedly, several students said reading in print was boring. In response to the question of what they “liked least” about reading in print, one participant complained that “It becomes boring sometimes,” while another wrote, “it takes time to sit down and focus on the material.” Common sense suggests that if students anticipate that text in print will be boring, they will likely approach it with reduced enthusiasm. Diminished interest sometimes translates into skimming rather than reading carefully and sometimes not doing the assigned reading at all.

Is the nature of reading changing?

The biggest challenge to reading attentively on digital platforms is that we largely use digital devices for quick action: Look up an address, send a Facebook status update, grab the news headlines (but not the meat of the article), multitask between online shopping and writing an essay. When we go to read something substantive on a laptop or e-reader, tablet, or mobile phone, our now-habitualized instincts tell us to move things along.

Coupled with this mindset is an evolving sense that writing is for the here-and-now, not the long haul. Since written communication first emerged (in different places, under different circumstances, at different times), one of its consistent attributes has been that it is a durable form of communication that one we can reread or refer to. Today, a nexus of forces is making writing seem more ephemeral.

A recent Pew Research Center study of news-reading habits (Mitchell et al., 2016) reported that among 18- to 29-year-olds, 50% said they often got news online, compared with only 5% who read print newspapers. While some of us save print news clippings, few archive their online versions. Vast numbers of students choose to rent textbooks (whether digitally or in print), which means the book is out of sight and not available for future consultation after the semester ends. True, K-12 students have long been giving back their print books at the end of the year, and college students have commonly sold books they don’t wish to keep. But my conversations now with students who are dedicated readers indicate they don’t see their college years as the time to start building a personal library.

If cost is removed from the equation, digital millennials commonly prefer print.

What about public or school libraries? Increasingly, budgets are being shifted from print to digital materials. The three primary motivations are space, cost, and convenience. To grow the collection, you don’t need to build another wing. Digital is (commonly) less expensive. And users can access the collection any time of day and anywhere in the world with only an internet connection.

All true. But there are consequences. When I access a library book digitally, I find myself “using” it, not reading it. I make a quick foray to find, for instance, the reference I need for an article I’m writing, and then I exit. Had I held the physical book in my hand, it might have taken longer to find the reference, but I probably would have read entire paragraphs or chapters. Microsoft researcher Abigail Sellen has made a related observation. In studying how people perceive material they read (or store) online, she says they “think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book” (cited in Jabr, 2013).

Savvy students are aware of how the computer FIND function lets them zero in on a specific word or phrase so as to answer a question they have been asked to write about, blithely dismissing the obligation to actually read the full assigned text. Using, not reading. The more we swap physical books for digital ones, the easier it is for students to swoop down and cherry-pick rather than work their way through an argument or story.

Finally, contemporary digital technology is altering the role of reading in education. Film strips of old have been replaced by far more engaging (and educationally enriching) TED Talks and YouTubes, podcasts and audio books. The potential of these digital media is extraordinary, both because of their educational richness and the democratic access they provide. Yet at the same time, we should be figuring out the right curricular balance of video, audio, and textual materials.

Implications for educators

The most important lesson I have learned from my research on reading in print versus digitally is the value of asking users themselves what they like and don’t like — and why — about reading in each medium. Students are acutely aware of the cognitive tradeoffs that many perceive themselves to be making when reading on one platform rather than the other. The issue is not that digital reading necessarily leads us to pay less attention. Rather, it is that digital technologies make it easy (and in a sense encourage us) to approach text with a different mindset than the one most of us have been trained to use while reading print.

We need to ask ourselves how the digital mindset is reshaping students’ (and our own) understanding of what it means to read. Since online technology is tailor-made for searching for information rather than analyzing complex ideas, will the meaning of “reading” become “finding information” rather than “contemplating and understanding”? Moreover, if print is increasingly seen as boring (compared with digital text), will our attention spans while reading print generally diminish?

Conceivably, we might progressively abandon careful reading in favor of what has been called “hyper reading” — in the words of Katherine Hayles (2012), reading that aims “to conserve attention by quickly identifying relevant information so that only relatively few portions of a given text are actually read” (p. 12). To be fair, even academics seem to be taking less time per scholarly article, particularly online articles, than they used to (Tenopir et al., 2009). When it comes to using web sites, studies indicate (Nielsen, 2008) that on average, people are likely reading less than 30% of the words.

The issue of sustained attention extends beyond reading onscreen to other digital media. Patricia Greenfield (2009) has observed that while television, video games, and the internet may foster visual intelligence, “the cost seems to be deep processing: mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”

Returning to the physical properties of print: If fewer young adults are building their own book collections and if libraries are increasingly going digital, will writing no longer be seen as a durable medium? Yes, we could always look up something again on a digital device, but do we? If audio and video are gradually supplanting text as sources of education and personal enrichment, how should we think about the future role of text as a vehicle of cultural dissemination?

Digital technology is still in its relative infancy. We know it can be an incredibly useful educational tool, but we need much more research before we can draw firm conclusions about its positive and negative features. In the case of reading, our first task is to make ourselves aware of the effect technology potentially has on how we wrap our minds around the written word when encountered in print versus onscreen. Our second task is to embed that understanding in our larger thinking about the role of writing as a means of communicating and thinking.

Ackerman, R. & Goldsmith, M. (2011). Metacognitive regulation of text learning: On screen versus on paper. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 17 (1), 18-32.

Baron, N.S. (2013). Redefining reading: The impact of digital communication media. PMLA , 128 (1), 193-200.

Baron, N.S. (2015). Words onscreen: The fate of reading in a digital world. New York, NY: Oxford.

Baron, N.S., Calixte, R.M., & Havewala, M. (2017). The persistence of print among university students: An exploratory study. Telematics & Informatics, 34, 590-604.

Carrier, L.M., Rosen, L.D., Cheever, N.A., & Lim, A.F. (2015). Causes, effects, and practicalities of everyday multitasking. Developmental Review, 35, 64-78.

Dyson, M.C. & Haselgrove, M. (2000). The effects of reading speed and reading patterns on the understanding of text read from screen. Journal of Research in Reading , 23 (2), 210-223.

Farinosi, M., Lim, C., & Roll, J. (2016). Book or screen, pen or keyboard? A cross-cultural sociological analysis of writing and reading habits basing on Germany, Italy, and the UK. Telematics and Informatics, 33 (2), 410-421.

Greenfield, P. M. (2009). Technology and informal education: What is taught, what is learned? Science, 232 (5910), 69-71.

Hayles, K. (2012). How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

Jabr, F. (2013, April 11). The reading brain in the digital age: The science of paper versus screens. Scientific American.

Kaufman, G. & Flanagan, M. (2016). High-low split: Divergent cognitive construal levels triggered by digital and nondigital platforms. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY: ACM, pp. 2773-2777.

Mangen, A., Walgermo, B.R., & Brønnick, K. (2013). Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension. International Journal of Educational Research, 58, 61-68.

Mitchell, A., Gottfried, J., Barthel, M., & Shearer, E. (2016, July 7). The modern news consumer: News attitudes and practices in the digital age. New York, NY: Pew Research Center. www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/the-modern-news-consumer

Nielsen, J. (2008, May 6). How little do users read? Fremont, CA: Nielsen Norman Group. www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/

Paul, A.M. (2014, April 10). Students reading e-books are losing out, study suggests. New York Times.

Schugar, J.T., Schugar, H., & Penny, C. (2011). A Nook or a book? Comparing college students’ reading comprehension levels, critical reading, and study skills. International Journal of Technology in Teaching and Learning, 7 (2), 174-192.

Schugar, H.R., Smith, C.A., & Schugar, J.T. (2013). Teaching with interactive e-books in grades K-6. The Reading Teacher, 66 (8), 615-624.

Tenopir, C., King, D.W., Edwards, S., & Wu, L. (2009). Electronic journals and changes in scholarly article seeking and reading patterns. Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspective, 61(1), 5-32.

Citation: Baron, N.S. (2017). Reading in a digital age. Phi Delta Kappan 99 (2), 15-20.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Naomi S. Baron

NAOMI S. BARON is a professor of linguistics, Department of World Languages and Cultures, American University, Washington, D.C.

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7 Digital literacies and the skills of the digital age

Introduction

Moving from Literacy to Digital Literacy

Literacy in the Digital Age

Reviewing Existing Frameworks for Digital Literacy/ies

Understanding

Communicating

Parting thoughts.

Learning Activities.

References.

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How the Digital Age Is Affecting Students

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Empowering the powerful: Corporate and government agendas generally do not serve democratic goals or achieve democratic outcomes. They serve the goals of those in power

Diminishing the governed: Digitally networked surveillance capitalism creates an undemocratic class system pitting the controllers against the controlled

Exploiting digital illiteracy: Citizens’ lack of digital fluency and their apathy produce an ill-informed and/or dispassionate public, weakening democracy and the fabric of society

Waging info-wars: Technology can be weaponized by anyone, anywhere, anytime to target vulnerable populations and engineer elections

Sowing confusion: Tech-borne reality distortion is crushing the already-shaky public trust in the institutions of democracy

Weakening journalism: There seems to be no solution for problems caused by the rise of social media-abetted tribalism and the decline of trusted, independent journalism

Responding too slowly: The speed, scope and impact of the technologies of manipulation may be difficult to overcome as the pace of change accelerates

Trust suffers when people’s infatuation with technology entices them away from human-to-human encounters

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Learning in the Digital Age

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Privacy in the Digital Age Essay

Introduction

Writing Processes in the Digital Age: A Networked Interpretation

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1 Introduction

2 Traditional Views of Writing Processes

2.1 A Sequential Set of Steps

2.2 A Collection of Choices

2.3 Social Activity

3 From Process to Workflow Models

3.1 Towards Networked Metaphors

3.2 Expansion of Invention

3.3 Increased Collaboration

3.4 Observing the Writing Process

4 Conclusion: Future Developments

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