Abstract
Digital policy literacy is a critical element of digital literacy that emphasizes an understanding of communication policy processes, the political economy of media, and technological infrastructures. This paper introduces an analytical framework of digital policy literacy and applies it to young people’s everyday negotiations of mobile privacy, in order to argue for increased policy literacy around privacy and mobile phone communication. The framework is applied to the Canadian context, where a small study engaged undergraduate university students in focus groups around their uses of mobiles and knowledge of mobile privacy issues. Findings reveal that while our participants were aware of a variety of privacy threats in mobile communication, they were not likely to participate in policy processes that might protect their privacy rights. The paper concludes with a discussion of why young people may not be motivated to intervene in policy processes and how their digital policy literacy around mobile privacy is mitigated by the construction of youth as a lucrative target consumer market for mobile devices and services.
Highlights
I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s coming to a point where you don’t really have any privacy
We ask how young people understand and negotiate their mobile privacy, situating it within a framework of digital policy literacy. This framework enables us to unpack the interrelated dimensions of policy processes, the political economy of media systems, and the infrastructures of communication systems, as they impinge on young Canadians’ mobile privacy
We argue that the digital policy literacy framework is a crucial addition to existing skills–based conceptions of digital literacy, in that it contributes an urgent consideration of the role of policy in everyday networked communication
Summary
I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s coming to a point where you don’t really have any privacy. Fluency in digital practices constitutes the basis for a thriving information economy, but enables a more connected and engaged citizenry; increased digital literacy will ‘open up new opportunities for all Canadians to participate in Canada’s democratic, economic, cultural and social life’ [3]. Digital literacy challenges notions of skills procurement; Buckingham, for example, describes how digital literacy cannot be seen ‘ as a matter of “information” or of “technology,”’ but as a means of ‘cultural understanding’ [7], which involves a critical perspective on the social, political, and economic implications of the ubiquity of information technology This stance is intended to foster in young people critical analysis of the relationships between media and audiences, information and power, as a crucial element of participatory democracy in the twenty–first century (Kellner and Share, 2007; Livingstone and Brake, 2010; Hoechsmann and Poyntz, 2012).
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