Reflection

After reading the digital citizenship article and attending the class in assembly hour discussing digital literacies I learned a lot however I found the class to be way more beneficial than the article as the article was rather written with some advanced vocabulary I did not totally understand while the class was rather friendly and I had the chance to ask questions whenever I did not understand anything.

My favorite part about the class was the activity where we held blue or white cards representing either “literacy” or “skill” and we held them up upon multiple examples of that were previewed such as “sharing a google doc” or “commenting on a google doc”. After this activity I learned that a skill is something simply one learns “how” to do and the steps to do it while a literacy is more of knowledge about the digital world and therefore its the actions that are made due to this knowledge.

There was a part in the article that states “A friend recently told me how he responded to people who were calling Muslims violent. He told them about me, someone he had never met in person, but whom he knew so well, and could cite as an example of a Muslim who was anything but violent. My friend lives in Florida, and he was the first person I asked about after the tragic Orlando shooting, even though I knew he was not in Florida at the time. Because of social media, I have come to know people different from myself so deeply that events like the #PulseOrlando shooting and #Brexit took on a much more personal meaning than just events happening on the other side of the world. I felt pain and grief.” In the article this situation is stated as an example of empathy. However, I disagree with this definition of empathy. I think that even if I had a friend I got to know through their tweets and twitter profile. This should not be enough for me to befriend them to the extent that I use him\her as a representation of their race or even to the extent that my emotions are affected after an incident that happened in the area where they live. What I see on their twitter profile is merely 10% of who they actually are and what they do in their daily life. I could very easily be a terrorist and have a fake profile that covers that up. We are sometimes surprised that the people we interact with in our daily lives dont turn out to be who we thought they are. Let alone people we befriended online. I actually think it is dangerous to allow one’s emotions and beliefs to be affected by people we only know through a digital screen.

Article link : https://clalliance.org/blog/critical-digital-citizenship-empathy-social-justice-online/