Digital Iteracy

“Digital iteracy” denotes the renewed importance of intellectual tooling to navigate an increasingly computerized society. The expression is articulated by David M. Berry in the introduction of Understanding Digital Humanities (also published in the form of an article, Computational Subjectivities):

I want to propose that, rather than learning a practice for the digital … we should be thinking about what reading and writing actually should mean in a computational age—which I call “iteracy”, drawing on the use of the term iteration within computation. This is to argue for critical understanding of the literature of the digital, and through that develop a shared digital culture through a form of digital Bildung.¹

The “literature” put forward by David M. Berry is neither vaporous nor particularly specialized: it concerns very concrete and varied issues such as personal finances, consumption of cultural products or interaction with others.

Within the digital realm, experiences are governed by computational logics, algorithms fed by data (whose given-ness must be critically challenged) modeled according to particular schemas. Digital environments are eminently constructed: everything must be formulated using the means of computation. In a game like Angry Birds in which ballistic laws are simulated by algorithmic modeling, the real laws of chemistry (to grow grass) or physics (which explain why the eggs break) are never actually involved but only simulated by mathematical equations, algorithmic models.²

Additionally, for people in everyday life who need the skills that enable them to negotiate an increasingly computational field—one need only think of the amount of data in regard to managing personal money, music, film, text, news, email, pensions and so forth—there will be calls for new skills of financial and technical literacy, or, more generally, a computational literacy—in other words, “iteracy” or computational pedagogy that the digital humanities could contribute to.

Most of the everyday is reconstructed through machines (and thus by those who are entrusted with such complex tasks), having a grasp on one’s own life through algorithmic environments requires a certain reading knowledge of digital objects, a minimal understanding of the functioning of software,³ beyond the mere graphical representation that is given to see—otherwise, human agency is reduced to a set of clicks, scrolls, and gestures, marked out by the restrictive modalities of “pretty” tightly polished interfaces which cancel out the conditions for the emergence of a critical mind.

The aim of digital iteracy is as much philosophical as social, and pedagogical as political: ensuring, or least permitting, the formation of “computational thinking” which becomes a (technical) means for autonomous subjects to blossom. Paying attention to the different materialities of the digital; experimental programming, with critical and creative intents; thinking with code in order to think differently about the very activity of thought: such are some of the possibilities proposed by the concept of iteracy.