Origins and Concepts of Digital Literacy

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the emergence and development of the idea of “digital literacy” and to show how it relates to the various other “literacies of information.” This is a topic whose terminology is very confused. Among those authors who have tried to disentangle it are Bawden (2001), Bawden and Robinson (2002), Kope (2006), Martin (2006a, 2006b), and Williams and Minnian (2007). Not only must the idea of digital literacy fi nd its place among information literacy, computer literacy, ICT literacy, e-literacy, network literacy, and media literacy, but it must also be matched against terms which avoid the “literacy” idea, such as informacy and information fluency. Indeed in some cases, mention of information or anything similar is avoided—particularly in workplace settings—as in “basic skills,” “Internet savvy,” or “smart working” (Robinson et al., 2005).