Digital Devices and Digital Culture

Digital devices are now in our pockets and surround us in digital culture, connecting us across the world in real time. Technology continues to bring disruptive innovation to every part of life including education, work, home life, travel, hobbies, communication, news, entertainment, healthcare, and scientific research. The focus of this chapter is an overview of various hardware and software tools that are used for literacy (metaliteracy) with emphasis on choosing the best device for the purpose at hand. As devices are constantly upgraded and evolving, it becomes impossible to predict how long each device, whether smart phone, tablet, or computer, can serve us. More importantly, understanding the basic advantages and disadvantages of current digital devices will allow individuals to adapt and make the best future choices for metaliteracy in a metamodern world.

Digital Citizenship

In metamodern culture, digital citizens are required to make multitudinous decisions about consuming and producing information around the clock. Technology surrounds us at home, at work, in our communities, in our schools and libraries with increased expectations of instant global communication. In networked society, our responsibilities for digital citizenship have become essential. Metaliteracy is key to digital citizenship and critical to education as learners acquire, produce, and share knowledge in collaborative online communities and social media platforms. As both physical citizens of local communities and virtual citizens of global communities, the oscillation between physical and virtual space epitomizes metamodernism, laying a foundation for the future. This chapter concludes with a look at future trends for the metamodern metaliterate learner.

Learning Environments

This chapter addresses changes in learning environments from primarily brick and mortar buildings to include online learning platforms, MOOCs, blended learning spaces, and virtual worlds. Learning management systems, virtual reality, and a plethora of technological tools have revolutionized education allowing schools and universities to offer distance courses and degrees entirely online and constructive learning experiences for students using innovative tools in creative spaces. Advantages and disadvantages of these various environments are discussed along with predictions for the future. Metamodern digital citizens may encounter rich learning experiences physically face-to-face or virtually through immersion in 3D simulated environments, requiring metaliteracy to communicate, collaborate, construct knowledge, and make sense of our rapidly changing world.

The Dark Side of Digital Culture

Technology presents the hope of solving many practical problems through scientific advancement; however, the rapid technological revolution gives rise to obvious concerns as well as issues and consequences yet to become clear. This chapter explores some of the problems and grave matters arising as we move toward ubiquitous computing in digital culture. Widespread use of networked applications creates new risks and vulnerabilities, changes education and communication, and some predict may even jolt our human psyche. Our homes, workplaces, and communities are predicted to be dramatically altered in the future by technology. Examination of various ramifications brought by digital innovation is essential for the future and illustrates the need for metaliteracy in formal and informal settings.

Preserving Literacy Formats

Changing formats of digital content presents challenges for the archival and preservation of historical information, which are essential to the future of civilization. This chapter explores digital formats relating to metaliteracy and the need to prepare for the future through understanding digital migration, digital archival, and personal digital legacy. Obsolete media concerns include evolutionary changes in digital file formats, servers, information networks, software applications, and the technology hardware necessary to access information. The exploration of changing literacy formats is an essential component of metaliteracy in the metamodern era.

Metaliteracy and Multiple Literacies

In networked digital culture, individuals communicate through multiple literacies including linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial ways of making meaning from information. Producing and consuming content requires new literacy skills and an ability to access and evaluate information in all modes to construct knowledge. Information is shared instantly through channels such as text messaging, blogging, social networking, videomaking, and podcasting. Processing information, in numerous modes, requires the metaliterate learner to utilize four domains (metacognitive, cognitive, behavioral, and affective). This chapter explains the emerging term ‘metaliteracy', advocates the use of this new term in the metamodern age, and examines best practices of learning and communicating in participatory environments.

Moving From Postmodernism to Metamodernism

This chapter describes the state or condition of society after the industrial revolution in the early 20th century as the information age overturned culture, ushering in postmodernity through the turn of the 21st century, which gave birth to what the author calls metamodernism. Philosophical movements present templates upon which individual thinkers characterize the cultural trends, artistic and literary achievements, scientific and technological advancements, and ways of thinking during a specific economic, social, and political time and space. The irreverence, cynicism, and irony of postmodernism gave way to a metamodern new sincerity and a new hope across the swinging pendulum of opposing ideas: tradition and innovation, birth and death, or truth and post-truth. The current cultural “sense of feeling” corresponds to networked culture and the critical need to address literacy in new ways.

Impact of the Internet on Literacy

This chapter explores how the internet has changed literacy from primarily reading and writing to juggling texts, emails, hypertexts, and digital applications on screens for both personal and professional agendas. Instant global access to information provides advantages for learning and communicating efficiently but requires matching the best application for a particular task with the user depending upon age or skill level and places a greater personal responsibility for evaluation and creation of content. The human brain, particularly the attention span, is changing due to the exponential growth and adoption of technological tools for the production and consumption of media in many formats for all age groups from early childhood through the elderly. Issues relating to literacy in the internet age (metaliteracy) are examined through generational life stages.

Background of Metamodernism and Metaliteracy

This chapter introduces metamodernism and metaliteracy with a background in both philosophical and historical contexts. Setting the scene for understanding literacy in the early part of the 21st century may help educators and learners at any age balance communication in physical, virtual, and augmented spaces through an understanding of the constantly swinging pendulum of polar extremes in a rapidly changing cultural era. Metamodernism, as a philosophical movement, allows room to respect traditional knowledge and wisdom of the past alongside the excitement of innovation, creating optimism about learning in the future. Definitions of current nomenclature are introduced with the goal of examining literacy through an emerging cultural lens leading to a discussion of both theory and practice.