Digital literacy is defined as the “engagement with digitally mediated information” on the web, including reading, writing and participating [1]. Included in the concept of digital literacy is also how we place ourselves with respect to the digital space. Digital users can be classified along a continuum between so-called “visitors” and “residents” [2], and this classification may depend on the context (for example, personal vs. professional use). The classification of users in terms of “visitors” and “residents” allows a flexible understanding of the digital users, where their behavior depends on motivation to engage in different contexts (personal vs. professional as examples). In visitor mode, users have a specific goal in mind, search for information and use it without leaving a trace online. In resident mode, users live part of their lives on the web [2], they are more interactive than in visitor mode, and produce content that can be traced online and which says something about who they are.
This course has made me reflect on my behavior as user of digital media, and I realized that I behave differently in personal and professional contexts. For personal use I use very few tools, mostly Facebook, where I can place myself somewhere between visitor and resident, leaning towards the visitor side. In Facebook for example, I post a few comments or photos occasionally, but I don’t use it so much to either organize events or as a means to express personal or political views.
In professional aspects – in contrast – I have slowly moved towards the “resident” category of digital users. For academic researchers, reputation and productivity are mostly measured by the amount and quality of peer-reviewed scientific publications, most often measured in terms of “impact factor” (an index that classifies journals depending on numbers of citations that their articles accumulate).
In the last few years, a number of online tools have become available for researchers to post their professional profiles including their publication records. Some of the most popular tools include: Google Scholar, ResearchGate and LinkedIn. As my colleagues have opened their profiles in those sites, I have sooner or later also created my own profile, where I keep an updated list of accomplishments and publications.
Recently, there is an increasing move towards greater availability of open-access research results. First, funding agencies are increasingly requiring all financially-supported research results to be made publicly available for free. Second, peer-reviewed journals are now encouraging and facilitating researchers to make their articles open access, however often charging extra publication fees. And third, an increasing number of editorials are becoming completely open access. As more open-access articles can be found by many researchers worldwide a new phenomenon is taking place. New article metrics have been developed that have started to keep a record of how often articles are accessed, downloaded, referred to in blogs, Google+ or tweeted…, as a sort of measure of the “online impact” of articles. One example of such metric is the “Altmetrics” score [3], which is an index that summarizes the online presence and what people are saying online about a given article. A higher Altmetrics score is given when articles are linked on Facebook, Twitter, news outlets, or mentioned in blogs and Google+ posts [3]. The advent of social media is therefore changing or at least offering alternative ways of how scientific output is measured. Tools like Altmetrics are useful in that they allow to get an impression on the public engagement of a new paper before it can even receive formal citations from other papers. However, the popularity of an article in social media needs to be taken with some caution, as it might not always necessarily represent a reliable indication of high research quality [4].
Social media is a powerful new phenomenon with yet incompletely understood impacts. How much effort then should we spent nowadays in developing higher levels of digital literacy, and in which context (personal or professional) is most appropriate to do so? The answer mostly depends on individual motivations and goals. In my personal case, I found that digital literacy is most useful in the professional (academic) context. However, until we fully understand the broader implications of social media, we should take a careful approach where we can combine digital with more traditional ways of sharing information. In the academic context, I have found myself moving a bit more towards resident status, while I also believe that social media should not replace but instead complement how scientific research is assessed. For personal aspects, I like to keep using social media in moderation.
[1] “Digital literacy”, Sara Mörtsell, http://www.slideshare.net/saramortsell/digital-literacy-onl152
[2] “Visitors and residents”, David White, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI&feature=youtu.be; http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049
[3] Altmetric, http://www.altmetric.com/
[4] “Research impact: Altmetrics make their mark” (2013), Roberta Kwok, Nature 500, 491-493, doi:10.1038/nj7463-491a, http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7463-491a
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