11 What is DigCiz and Why I am Not Marina Abramovic: Thoughts on Theory and Prac
11 What is DigCiz and Why I am Not Marina Abramovic: Thoughts on Theory and Practice
Autumm Caines
Theory
Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt just finished a round of facilitation in the #DigCiz conversation where they challenged us to think about moving away from a personal responsibility model of digital citizenship. In a joint blog post they spend time distinguishing digital citizenship from cybersaftey and present Jole Westheimer’s work identifying three different types of citizens to ultimately ask “What kind of (digital) citizen” are we talking about.
Additionally, this week, outside of our #DigCiz hashtag, Josie Fraser blogged about some views around digital citizenship. Here we see Josie, reminiscent of Katia and Alec, making a distinction between digital citizenship and what she identifies as e-safety but also setting it apart from digital literacy. Josie presents a venn diagram where digital citizenship is one part of a larger interaction overlapping with e-safety and digital literacy.
In other DigCiz news, this week a group of us (Sundi and I included) who presented at the annual ELI conference in Houston on digital citizenship in the liberal arts published an EDUCAUSE Review article highlighting four different digital citizenship initiatives inside of our institutions.
All of this is on the tails of our first week of #DigCiz where Mia Zamora and Bonnie Stewart troubled the idea of digital citizenship. In a post about this Bonnie artfully lays out the conflict of utopian narratives of the web as a tool for democracy with the realities of what I’m more and more just lumping under Shoshana Zubhoff’s concept of Surveillance Capitalism though you could just say it is the general Silicon Valley ethos.
But I want to get back to Katia and Alec’s call to move the conversation beyond personal responsibility. Often, digital citizenship is lumped in with things like digital/information literacy, nettiquette, online safety, and a whole host of other concepts. Often these are just variations of issues that existed way before the “digital” but are complicated by the digital.
I’m considering Katia and Alec’s call, reflecting on all of these posts and articles as well as the last year and several months of thinking and conversing about this topic on #DigCiz and I can’t help but feel like we are in the weeds on this concept.
So here it is – my foundational, basic, details ripped away, 10,000 foot view at digital citizenship where things like safety and literacy are part of the model but not the whole thing.
I’ve thought about digital citizenship like this for some time and Josie’s post reminded me the idea of representing it as a venn diagram and though some of the overlaps are messy I think that is normal.
I really want to focus and drill down on digital citizenship so I put it in the middle and zoom out from there. The factors that I see at play around digital citizenship are environments and people. In terms of people there is the individual and then