National Geographic Society Newsroom

It Matters Most To You: On Digital Literacy and Data Production

There are three things that happened to me over the last two weeks that are entirely responsible for this entry: ONE: I attended Quartz’s The Next Billion conference, an event about the one billion new internet users expected to come online by 2017. At the conference, Mark Surman, an Executive Director at Mozilla gave a...

East-London-15

There are three things that happened to me over the last two weeks that are entirely responsible for this entry:

ONE: I attended Quartz’s The Next Billion conference, an event about the one billion new internet users expected to come online by 2017. At the conference, Mark Surman, an Executive Director at Mozilla gave a talk that addressed in part the topic of digital literacy. Digital literacy is usually defined as access to the practices, skills, and cultural resources that can be applied to using and understanding digital tools. Surman described it more concisely: people knowing what choices they can make in regards to their devices. According to Surman, this skill is a hallmark of the 21st century, and is only becoming more important.

TWO: I re-read a Guardian article from October 2014 which was essentially a rumination on data ownership from Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In the article, Berners-Lee makes the point that while firms have a financial investment in collecting data, it is individual users who should be most deeply invested in their data. “[My] information is more valuable to me than it is to the cloud,” he quips in the article. Translation: you’re the person who cares the most about your own data—after all, it’s about you.

And THREE: My mom inadvertently dropped some wisdom on me (as she is wont to do) . During a recent phone call, she asked how my Fulbright-National Geographic project was going. I immediately launched into a long description about everything I’ve been doing: meeting with participants, figuring out how to present people’s data, working out the kinks of the final product, and so on. When I finished my monologue, I heard silence on the other end.

“Are you going to figure out how to explain all of that in a way that a normal person can understand?” She finally asked.

Her point was made: I had fallen so deep into the granularity of my project that I had forgotten how to talk about it in a way that was clear, intelligible, and interesting for someone else to listen to. My own mom had been bored listening to me talk.

I'm interested in translating numbers like these into things that make sense to most people.
Data generated by my phone. My mission is to discover how to translate these into things that people can better understand.

So here’s what I learned from the convergence of these three events: more and more people are accessing the Internet and the web. In order to successfully participate in this emerging digital reality, it’s imperative that those internet users have the skill of digital literacy. If we don’t highlight the importance of knowing and understanding our devices and how they interact with our data, we’re in danger of creating and reproducing inequalities and privileging some people with greater access and abilities than others.

At the same time, just knowing this fact isn’t enough. It was so easy for me to slip into esoteric lingo and rambly nonsense when I was speaking with my mom, which is the exact type of talk and behavior that can be intimidating or just plain disinteresting. I’m working on a project that is deeply shaped by the goal of empowering people to understand the outcomes of their digital productions. If it was that easy for me to fall into the jargon trap, then perhaps it says something about how much of a conscious effort the process of inclusion and accessibility demands.

But there’s hope, and it comes in the form of Berners-Lee’s proclamation, something that over the past nine months I have found to be deeply true: people care about their own data. We care about our own lives, and when data is reframed as being just another aspect of us, it suddenly becomes important and easy to understand.

That’s the space that I’m trying to situate my project within, and as I near the end, it’s becoming ever more clear to me how important this mission is. As always, reach out to me if you have thoughts on ways to do this.

About National Geographic Society

The National Geographic Society is a global nonprofit organization that uses the power of science, exploration, education and storytelling to illuminate and protect the wonder of our world. Since 1888, National Geographic has pushed the boundaries of exploration, investing in bold people and transformative ideas, providing more than 15,000 grants for work across all seven continents, reaching 3 million students each year through education offerings, and engaging audiences around the globe through signature experiences, stories and content. To learn more, visit www.nationalgeographic.org or follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Meet the Author

Mimi Onuoha
Mimi Onuoha is a New York City-based researcher and artist who is in the United Kingdom visualizing information about groups of Londoners based on digital data collected from their phones. Her project, which consists of website and exhibition outputs, uses data to explore the stories of how our increasingly networked relationships unfold across on and offline spaces.