Construct · 4 names · 4 citations
Different names. Different fields. One construct. One map.
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Gilster's 1997 book Digital Literacy gave the term its popular currency, defining it as the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide range of digital sources, with critical evaluation of what one finds treated as the core skill rather than mere button-pushing. He argued that reading on a network is an active assembling of knowledge from scattered, unvetted pieces, so judging credibility and connecting sources matter more than any single tool. This is the broad, umbrella capacity that the later entries here rename or subdivide: it is one construct, the ability to find, evaluate, create, and communicate using digital technology, and the disagreement in this family is over how to cut it up and what to call it, not over four unrelated things.[1]
Eshet-Alkalai's 2004 Digital literacy: A conceptual framework for survival skills in the digital era took the same broad capacity Gilster described and gave it internal structure, proposing that digital literacy is not one skill but a bundle of five: photo-visual literacy (reading images and interfaces), reproduction literacy (creating new meaning from existing digital material), branching literacy (navigating non-linear, hyperlinked space), information literacy (evaluating what one finds), and socio-emotional literacy (behaving and collaborating online). The move is a re-partition, not a new object: it keeps the phrase digital literacy while renaming the whole as a framework and slicing it into named parts. Where Gilster offered an umbrella term, this entry offers a labelled taxonomy of the same territory, which is why the two are the same construct under different names.[2]
Media literacy is the older sibling in this family, brought forward from print and broadcast into digital settings. Potter's 2010 review The State of Media Literacy describes it as a set of perspectives that people actively use to interpret the meaning of the messages they encounter, built on the abilities to access, analyse, evaluate, and create media in a variety of forms. Its centre of gravity is the message and the audience's critical reading of it, a concern that predates the internet and grew up around film, television, and advertising. When that same critical-reading capacity is applied to networked digital media it overlaps heavily with digital literacy, so the two names often cover the same competence: this is a naming difference between neighbouring fields, not a difference in the underlying construct.[3]
Information literacy is the library-science framing, the tradition behind the Association of College and Research Libraries' standards and later framework for higher education. It names the ability to recognise when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, and use it effectively. Bawden's 2001 review Information and digital literacies: A review of concepts, published in the Journal of Documentation, set the information-literacy and digital-literacy vocabularies side by side and showed how far they overlap, along with computer literacy, network literacy, and related terms. The construct here is the same underlying capacity to work critically with information; the difference is a disciplinary label, with libraries saying information literacy where technology educators say digital literacy for much of the same skill.[4]
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