Background Knowledge Probe

• In what ways have you been shaped by technology? When, where, how, and why?
• In what ways have you helped to shape technology? When, where, how, and why?
• In what ways have the people closest to you been shaped, positively and negatively, by this shaping of technology? When, where, how, and why?

Digital Technology = Social + Technical

There’s a growing realization that our digital technologies are actually a seamless, indivisible combination of artifacts, people, organizations, policies, economics, histories, cultures, and knowledge – that they are sociotechnical products. And over the last several decades, this has gone further to acknowledge a mutual shaping of gender and technology.^[1] As a result, the reliable, anticipatable relationship between user input and system output is complicated by the continuous evolution of experience, knowledge, history, culture, economics, and policies of users and society. The social characteristics cannot be readily planned for or controlled, especially as sociotechnical products are continuously co-created by everyday users to fit the ever-changing contexts and knowledge of users and their communities.^[2] As such, a reductionist and positivist approach and associated deductive reasoning common in much of basic research must be complemented by, and live in continuous tension with, an interpretive approach and associated inductive reasoning of the social scientists, and even more importantly, with the community cultural wealth, expertise, and knowledges of community members.

Innovations-in-Use

[A]n innovation is not an object that can be packed inside a box, but rather a set of practices that emerges from the social setting of its use. Thus, in a sense, the user does not accept or reject an innovation but instead creates it through action in the world.

Bertram Bruce, Andee Rubin, and Junghyun An, “Situated Evaluation of Socio-Technical Systems”

In his thought-provoking 2015 book, Geek Heresy, Kentaro Toyama notes that technology does not itself have agency to transform us and the world around us. Rather, humans use technology to amplify our individual and group forces to transform our world. This is primarily framed from the perspective of the everyday user. However, if we bring criticality together with an interpretive sociotechnical perspective, we also need to reflect on the human forces amplified at each level of a product’s life cycle.^[3] We need to ask: How are the forces of engineers, computer scientists, and garage inventors; of the president, CEO, board, and shareholders of corporations; of the marketers and salespeople; of government legislators and administrators; of educators and social service agencies; of individuals and groups as co-creators; and of the many others in the product life cycle, amplified in ways that are consistent with and counter to the values and goals of those using the sociotechnical product at each stage of the artifact’s life cycle?

Each stakeholder, from the everyday user/co-creator to the government and corporate official, brings their unique history, intersectionality, expertise, etc., to bear, amplifying the influencing social and technical structures of the digital technologies around us. The personal and social aspects thereby shape the code, software, and information — as well as the physical electronics on which the code, software, and information reside. At the same time, the code, software, information, and physical structure shape the individuals and social structures making use of those technologies. Given this amplification and mutual shaping of the sociotechnical artifacts and the overarching systems, what literacies are required for us to move from passive consumers to active innovators-in-use of digital technologies?

Community Inquiry as the Basis for Digital Literacy Radically Reconsidered

Literacy is a set of competencies and knowledge within a certain domain. Digital literacy, then, is literacy within the realm of digital information and communication technologies. Summarizing a variety of definitions regarding digital literacy and related computational thinking, this set of competencies includes:

• Technical skills: The ability to appropriately select and effectively use a range of technologies.
• Information skills: The ability to seek, evaluate, interpret, and apply relevant and trustworthy information across multiple media.
• Cognitive skills: The ability to logically analyze and organize problems in ways that allow use of digital and other tools to help solve them and to generalize new processes to other problems.
• Socio-emotional skills: The ability to communicate and collaborate with others, along with the personal confidence, persistence, and tolerance needed to tackle complex, ambiguous, and open-ended problems.
• Application skills: The ability to integrate the above skills into our everyday experiences in order to advance our professional, personal, and civic interests and responsibilities.

If we are to assure active participation in civic society and meaningful, diverse and inclusive contributions to vibrant, informed, and engaged community, it is essential to add the social justice-oriented  progressive community [inter]action and critical social + technical skills to these other five points.

• The critical social + technical skills are brought forward as part of person- and community-centered deliberative dialogue processes using critical research paradigms, pedagogies, and abductive reasoning in combination with each of the five commonly considered digital literacy skills listed above.
• Progressive community [inter]action skills are simultaneously used in combination with the starting five digital literacy skills by advancing our ability to work together in communities of inquiry that make continued use of collective leadership, functional diversity, members’ capability sets and freedom of choice to better achieve valued beings and doings, community cultural wealth, and care work and ethics.

Whether as part of preprofessional and professional development of library and information management workers, or as part of programming offered by these professionals, a radical reconsideration of digital literacy is essential if we are to effectively use sociotechnical products to amplify human forces which advance human and community development. This social-forward approach to digital literacy training doesn’t negate learning about the nuts and bolts of the hardware and software. It instead works to advance our critical social + technical skills so as to situate such learning within the individual and group goals and values.

Lesson Plan

While the focus of the technical chapter, “Electronic Components in Series,” is on how we can reuse the LEDs and resistors in combination with momentary switch push buttons, it is important for us to also continually reflect on the social aspects of these sociotechnical artifacts. Our educational and professional systems are built so as to often separate these two aspects. How can we work together in this session and in each of the following sessions to identify ways in which mutual shaping and amplification of sociotechnical artifacts has happened or is happening with this moment? How are we working to further the gendering of the artifacts? How are we working to problematize these artifacts so as to advance a more person-centered approach?