Cultural and Social Understanding
What Is This?
Cultural and Social Understanding is another way of describing a digital citizen's understanding of what their interactions with, and personal relationships through, technology mean. The context of technology use, and interpersonal dialogue, can easily be lost on someone who is not able to work within cultural norms they may finds themselves in.
An example of misunderstood cultural and social context could be one that has a recent technology using senior citizen who is connected to their teen-grandchild through a popular social media application - they may be unable to understand the context of conversations with their grandchild, or those observed amongst their grandchild's circle of friends. Other general misunderstandings of cultural and social meaning could also result from geographic, racial, gender, economic, or similar reasons.
Classroom Applications - What Does This Look Like?
For the classroom teacher, cultural and social implications of digital literacy are likely going to surface around:
- Gender
- Age / Maturity
- Language (ESL, dialect, or similar)
- Family Values & Economics (device access)
- Technical Know-How
Making students aware of the importance of understanding context while using technology to access the Web, and interact socially, should help them to understand that what they believe to be true can be very different from what is intended by the content creator.
Teacher and Student Resources
Taken Out of Context - Doctoral dissertation by Danah Boyd
Dealing with Culture - Essay by Danah Boyd
Embracing a Culture of Connectivity - YouTube video lecture by Danah Boyd
I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience - published article by Alice E. Marwick and Danah Boyd
Cultural and Social Understanding is another way of describing a digital citizen's understanding of what their interactions with, and personal relationships through, technology mean. The context of technology use, and interpersonal dialogue, can easily be lost on someone who is not able to work within cultural norms they may finds themselves in.
An example of misunderstood cultural and social context could be one that has a recent technology using senior citizen who is connected to their teen-grandchild through a popular social media application - they may be unable to understand the context of conversations with their grandchild, or those observed amongst their grandchild's circle of friends. Other general misunderstandings of cultural and social meaning could also result from geographic, racial, gender, economic, or similar reasons.
Classroom Applications - What Does This Look Like?
For the classroom teacher, cultural and social implications of digital literacy are likely going to surface around:
- Gender
- Age / Maturity
- Language (ESL, dialect, or similar)
- Family Values & Economics (device access)
- Technical Know-How
Making students aware of the importance of understanding context while using technology to access the Web, and interact socially, should help them to understand that what they believe to be true can be very different from what is intended by the content creator.
Teacher and Student Resources
Taken Out of Context - Doctoral dissertation by Danah Boyd
Dealing with Culture - Essay by Danah Boyd
Embracing a Culture of Connectivity - YouTube video lecture by Danah Boyd
I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience - published article by Alice E. Marwick and Danah Boyd