As part of my work with Mozilla around Web Literacy Map v2.0 I want to use the web to tell the story of the history of web literacy. It might seem obvious to start from the 1990s, but it’s worth saying that developments in new literacies pre-date that decade. Check out Chapter 4 of my thesis for more detail on this.

This is the first of a (proposed) series of posts leading up to my keynote at the Literacy Research Association conference in Miami at the beginning of December.

Note: there’s lots of histories of the web itself. If you’re interested in that, just start with the relevant Wikipedia page. Here, I’m focusing on the discourse around the skills required to use the web.

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Books

The easiest way to get started is to use a couple of Google tools. Here’s what we get when we plug web literacy as a search term into Google Books Ngram Viewer, focusing on books published between 1990 and today:

Just to put that into context, here’s web literacy charted against information literacy, digital literacy, and media literacy:

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Web searches

A Google Books search only gives us search terms from books - and then, of course, only those books that have been scanned by Google.

Let’s have a look at Google Trends. This contains search queries by users entering terms into the Google search engine. These trends are constrained (unfortunately) to queries from 2004 onwards:

Again, in context:

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Discussion

So what do these graphs tell us? Well, not much by themselves, to be honest. It’s s shame that Google Trends only goes back as far as 2004 and, as far as I can ascertain, there’s no competitors to this product. Yahoo’s Clue service closed earlier this year, as have similar startups and services. So we only have Google’s view in this regard.

I need to do some more research, but from the years I spent researching digital literacy, my feeling is that we can talk about three periods for web literacy.

1990-1999

‘Web literacy’ was the term used by academics in the late 1990s to describe the differences between the page and the screen. There was a lot of discussion of hypertext. The focus was on understanding the similarities and differences between the page and the screen.

There was a lot of excitement about the affordances of the web as a new medium and, in particular, the ways that stories could be told. It fit in well to postmodern descriptions of the world around us as being fractal and contingent.

2000-2009

In the first decade of the 21st century, 'web literacy’ programmes (some of which still exist) became common in educational institutions. These focused on basic web skills for staff and students. Many of these were wrapped up in wider 'information literacy’ or 'digital literacy’ programmes and included procedural skills as well as learning how to spot internet hoaxes. This would be termed 'Credibility’ on the Web Literacy Map v1.1

In the main, however, due to Marc Prensky’s (damaging) article on 'digital natives’ and 'digital immigrants’, there was a feeling that young people just grew up’ understanding this stuff so there’s was no particular need to teach it. This idea was demolished by a 2008 article in the British Journal of Educational Technology.

2010-onwards

There’s been a shift in the last few years to understanding that literacy practices relating to the web constitute more than just: 1) reading and writing using different tools, and 2) spotting internet hoaxes. The web is something we carry around with us everywhere, accessed through devices we still call 'mobile phones’. The web mediates our lives.

Most recently, due to the Snowden revelations, there’s been a realisation that that these devices aren’t neutral. They can shape the way we view the world, how we interact with one another, and the way others view us. The revelations showed us that our reliance on 'free’ services has led to corporate surveillance and government surveillance on a massive scale.

Although 'web literacy’ is a term that’s still gaining traction, there’s a growing movement of people who feel that the skills and competencies required to read, write and participate on the web are something that need to be learned and taught.

It’s into this world that we launched v1.1 of the Web Literacy Map. We hope to do even better and promote the Web Literacy Map as a platform with version 2.0.

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Comments? Questions? Direct them to doug@mozillafoundation.org

http://literaci.es/toward-a-history-of-web-literacy