Howard Rheingold on essential media literacies

“Increasingly I think the digital divide is less about access to technology and more about the difference between those who know how and those who don’t know how,” he said. He’s convinced that what’s most important is not access to the Internet — we have more than a billion people on the Internet now and there are 4 billion phones out there — but access to knowledge and literacies for the digital age. “The ability to know has suddenly become the ability to search and the ability to sift” and discern. “Skill plus social” is the key.

“the difference between those who know how and those who don’t know how” – this is ringing a bell also for the corporate setting (granted, we need this more when thinking about knowledge workers working in ad-hoc and informal multi-project work settings than on the automated shop floor).

For Enterprise 2.0 it’s always less about providing the tools but about helping people evolve and develop the methods they need to do their job better (sounds like the real job of the Enterprise 2.0 change management consultant, huh?). And if that helps improve “day to daycorporate life” all the better.

Notice also the essential skills (literacies, I call them media competencies):

• Attention (we need attention management ..)
• Participation (and empathy I say)
• Collaboration
• Critical consumption (having a well-tuned internal crap detector)

Update: There’s also a video of Howard Rheingold’s talk on 21st century literacies at the Reboot Britain conference (40 min in totl) here