The Uses of Digital Literacy

"The UQP Creative Economy + Innovation Culture" series showcases fresh research approaches to global creative thinking, enterprise and innovation. The series links creative and digital media fields to law, education, business and technology. Online social networks, user-created content and participatory media are often still ignored by professionals, denounced in the press and banned in schools. But the potential of digital literacy should not be underestimated. Fifty years after Richard Hoggart's pioneering "The Uses of Literacy" reshaped the educational response to popular culture, John Hartley extends Hoggart's argument into digital media. Print media made possible the realism of the modern age - journalism, the novel and science - not to mention mass entertainment on a global scale. What, then, are the possibilities of digital media? Hartley reassesses the historical and global context, commercial and cultural dynamics and the potential of popular productivity through analysis of the use of digital media in various domains, including creative industries, digital storytelling, YouTube, journalism and mediated fashion. Encouraging mass participation in the evolutionary growth of knowledge, "The Uses of Digital Literacy" shows how today a teenage fad may become tomorrow's scientific method. The time has come for education to catch up with entertainment and for the professionals to learn from popular culture.