The Digital Divide
This came to me while I was reading National Geographic a couple of days ago – it was an article about renewable resources that stated than 1.1 people in the world today lack access to electricity. It made me reflect again on Dobson and Willinsky’s (2009) “digital divide” and other discourse around multimodality and its effect on our language, culture, etc. There is seemingly little attention paid to the fact that a huge number of people are not currently in the conversation. I decided to edit a picture from Creative Commons to reflect my thoughts.
(N.B. If you turned to the “article” about 62% of adults not having a computer, you would find it also applies to emerging/developing countries (Pew Research Center, 2015, March 18))
I used a tool called “Canva” that I found while looking for a something to make a mock magazine cover. In its favour, it had a large number of templates for both covers and pages, and its editing was fairly robust for a free product (it did have “premium” features as well). On its downside, there were limited filters for images (I would have faded it more if I could), and moving things around was sometimes frustrating. I originally wanted to have a crack down the centre of the “divide,” but couldn’t find a way to do so short of creating it in another program. That said, one could make an acceptable cover with Canva without a layout program and other asset producing software. I didn’t try the page templates, but there appeared to be a good variety to choose from.
p.s. It came out pretty pixelated here on WP…sorry!
References:
Dobson, T. & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. Cambridge Handbook of Literacy. Retrieved from http://pkp.sfu.ca/files/Digital%20Literacy.pdf
Keith, J. (2011). Cuddling with multiple devices. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/74105777@N00/6153558098
Pew Research Center (2015, March 18). Internet seen as positive influence on education but negative on morality in emerging and developing nations. Retrieved from http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/03/19/internet-seen-as-positive-influence-on-education-but-negative-influence-on-morality-in-emerging-and-developing-nations/technology-report/
University of Alabama Birmingham (2015) The future of mobile application development. Retrieved from http://assets.entrepreneur.com/article/1409068924-by-2017-app-market-will-be-77-billion-dollar-industry-infographic.jpg?_ga=1.107294786.1794273905.1447230775
World Bank (2015, September 16) Energy Overview. Retrieved from http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/energy/overview
Hi Mary:
An original idea! Will be checking out Canva. Thanks.