Regardless of how it is packaged, the main goal of ‘digital literacy’ is helping people make more use of digital technology. This is why the IT industry tends to love the idea of digital literacy, and why many tech corporations gladly endorse, support and fund digital literacy efforts.

The big tech corporations would much rather that we focus on the ‘imperative’ of digital literacy rather than work to regulate tech providers and their products. From a tech industry perspective, pushing for digital literacy is much easier (not to say much more profitable) than ensuring that their products are genuinely safe, non-harmful and fit-for-purpose.

Indeed, digital literacy gives tech firms a neat get-out clause. Any problems that people face from tech can be immediately attributed to their lack of digital literacy. Conversely, the solution to these problems can be immediately identified as providing more digital literacy. All the time, blame is firmly placed on the people using the tech rather than those designing, developing and selling it.

This is why digital literacy needs to be called out for what it is – a distraction, a smokescreen, a disingenuous gesture towards empowering people in the digital age. Instead, much more attention needs to be paid to the idea of critical digital literacy – an approach that genuinely sets out to help people actively question, scrutinise, challenge and resist the worse aspects of the tech that they are presented with … and actively engage with the idea of other technologies.

Critical digital literacy efforts aim to help people develop understandings of how to best work with, work around and work against the technologies that they encounter in their everyday lives. Critical digital literacy efforts aim to help people develop critical consciousness both of the technical logics and business logics of the big digital systems that have come to dominate contemporary society.

These educational aims are unlikely to ever feature high on the CSR commitments of tech corporations. As such, critical digital literacy is something that needs to be nurtured from by public sector and civil society actors – e.g. within schools, universities and community education; across public library systems; by trade unions, and so on. Many fantastic examples of critical digital literacy programs and initiatives already exist – all striving to advance genuinely equitable and empowering forms of digital engagement, and all of which can be built on in the next few years.

Critical digital literacy is not something that the tech industry is particularly motivated or incentivised to support. Indeed, one of the ultimate outcomes of critical digital literacy is to push for greater public oversight, regulation and restriction of how Big Tech corporations get to profit from our everyday lives … surely we can’t get more ‘digitally literate’ than that?