Thankful for Digital Literacy

Today in the Cedar City Library in the Park I was using one of the public computers when a fifty-something man with salt and pepper hair and a red baseball cap sat down at the computer next to me. After about a minute he asked me, “How do I get the Internet to work?”  I leaned towards his monitor and saw that he had Internet Explorer open.
“It looks like it’s working.  What are you trying to do?”
“Where do I write the dot com?”
So I showed him where the address bar was.
“You just click in here to highlight the text and then erase it.”  I took his mouse and showed him, then hit Backspace.
“That key gets rid of the words?”
“Yeah, that’s the Backspace key.  It means erase.”
“Oh, I thought that arrow was to erase.” He pointed with his mouse at the Back arrow in the browser. “They’ve gone and changed everything on me since I last used one of these.”
“You haven’t used a computer in a long time?”
“It’s been about ten years.”

This experience helped me realize how crippling it could be to lack basic digital literacy.  I don’t consider myself among the extremely digitally literate, but I realize now I’ve taken for granted how important my fairly basic knowledge is to accomplish tasks online.  Without that knowledge, much of my homework and many day-to-day tasks would be impossible to accomplish.

And it’s not just the technical knowledge of how to navigate the web that’s important.  It’s also understanding the culture of the Internet so you know what to look for and what to avoid.  When my acquaintance at the library navigated to the website he was looking for, it turned out to be one of those “one weird trick” advertisements, this time to “evade Obama’s energy monopoly and reduce your energy bills by half.”  I wanted to explain to him that that sort of advertising wasn’t any good, but I wasn’t sure he would believe me, so I didn’t say anything.

As the Digital Age becomes more and more digital, lack of digital literacy is going to become a bigger and bigger problem for people like the man I met in the library.  What will these people do if services that are traditionally offline move online?  How will they function?  I hope that as digital literacy becomes increasingly important, more communities and organizations will offer free computer classes to help.  In the near future, not knowing how to use the web may be just as crippling as not knowing how to read.