Necessary expertise? (original) (raw)

2015, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

This special issue sets out to explore questions of digital skill and expertise, asking how various forms of expertise are engendered, distributed and valued in computational culture. We begin with the following questions: Who can use digital technologies, and to what level, with what facility, in relation to which forms of use? What are the relays through which expertise may circulate and be shared? What is the relationship between the automation of expertise that computerization undertakes and what is asked of human users in various situations? How is digital expertise generated and shared? How is digital expertise specific and how does it relate to other forms of aptitude, other skills or capacities? How are forms of expertise variously gauged, judged or valued? We are thus broadly concerned with questions of access-and with a politics of access-asking what is needed for individuals and groups to be able to access new forms of knowledge and information, to exploit emerging possibilities for cultural production and expression and to maintain their grip on services translated onto digital platforms. But we are concerned that questions framed in terms of access are content with access and that it is taken as 'enough' to have opened the door. Of course, there are ways this question has been taken forwards in digital scholarship-notably in relation to discussions of digital literacy, which are themselves often concerned with the digital native, and distinctions between the born digital and the digital immigrant. However, our sense is that these terms too refuse a certain set of questions, for instance, about what it means to be technologically literate, about the adequacy of 'literacy' as an end goal and/or the effectiveness-or need-for intervention; if 'the native' already has the skills and 'the immigrant' is constitutionally unable to acquire them, what is to be done for either group? It is partly because we believe that terms like digital literacy, digital native, born digital, digital immigrant, mask, if not negate, issues we feel are important to address (e.g. see Bassett et al., 2013; Thornham and McFarlane, 2011) that we have sought to find a new way to address them.