From the personal to the societal – the challenge of moving from everyday ‘interpersonal’ digital literacies to deeper social understandings

This paper is based on the keynote presentation at MIL 2019 in Seoul, November 2019. It argues, that as the digital has transformed social relationships, what we know about the world, and how that knowledge constitutes and legitimates forms of authority, forms of power and contemporary politics, so we need a changed version of media or digital literacy. Media literacy or digital literacy have taken their time in becoming an acceptable part of both the school curriculum but there is now a greater urgency in adapting these kinds of media and digital literacy frameworks for the current situation. Secondly, the argument distinguishes between everyday, common sense ‘interpersonal’ digital literacies – that is the kinds of understandings people make up as they learn to live with these technologies – and the more formal critical literacies that we usually encounter in the school or university curriculum. It challenges how people can travel from the everyday to the more formal and who should take responsibility for this, how we might measure it and above all what will happen to our societies if we don t take on this responsibility.