Stephen Downes

Read the Emily Segal post first, then this post. Belshaw argues here that "If we swap 'Digital literacy' for 'Taste' then it's a socially-negotiated relation between people, tools, practices, contexts, and communities." From which we can argue, "Literacy-slop is the credential without the community of practice; it's the qualification without the learning; the skills certificate for getting an AI agent to click through a self-paced module on digital skills. It looks like literacy, satisfying the classifier. But it's just curation without a social body." Or put another way: "There exists a whole complex of knowledge, dispositions, and social relationships that makes someone capable in various digital contexts." The labels are just the socially accepted markers of success or of capability in that context.

My view: there's a lot right here, but I don't agree with it all. Words don't have meaning on their own, sure. They only have meaning in a context. But context can be anything; it doesn't need to be a community or a society. It doesn't have to be negotiated. There is no process of 'making meaning'. Context is (literally) the network of entities a thing is embedded in; meaning is the emergent pattern in that network that is recognized by a viewer when prompted by the thing. There is no one meaning, no 'real' meaning, obviously, because there are many viewers, many ways of seeing the same things. Any negotiation that happens isn't about the actual meaning; it's about establishing and holding power in that community, a hierarchy of symbolism, just like taste.