It Matters Most To You: On Digital Literacy and Data Production

There are three things that happened to me over the last two weeks that are entirely responsible for this entry:

ONE: I attended Quartz’s The Next Billion conference, an event about the one billion new internet users expected to come online by 2017. At the conference, Mark Surman, an Executive Director at Mozilla gave a talk that addressed in part the topic of digital literacy. Digital literacy is usually defined as access to the practices, skills, and cultural resources that can be applied to using and understanding digital tools. Surman described it more concisely: people knowing what choices they can make in regards to their devices. According to Surman, this skill is a hallmark of the 21st century, and is only becoming more important.

TWO: I re-read a Guardian article from October 2014 which was essentially a rumination on data ownership from Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In the article, Berners-Lee makes the point that while firms have a financial investment in collecting data,
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