A student can fail a digital literacy assignment while being digitally fluent in a world the instructor cannot even see. The student may struggle to format a Word document, attach the correct file to an email, or organize a spreadsheet. At the same time, that student may move effortlessly through online communities governed by their own symbols, references, genres, reputations, and unwritten rules.
The institution recognizes the first set of practices as digital literacy. It creates course objectives for them, purchases textbooks about them, measures them with rubrics, and eventually certifies that the student possesses them.
The second set may remain nearly invisible. No institution designed it. No professor controls it. No credential recognizes it. Yet it is still learned, practiced, policed, and used to determine who belongs.
One literacy comes from above. The others grow from below.
The Autonomous Model
In Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984), the British anthropologist Brian Street distinguished between autonomous and ideological models of literacy.
The autonomous model treats literacy as a neutral, self-contained skill. A person either possesses it or does not. Once acquired, it can supposedly be transported from one situation to another and will produce generally beneficial effects: better reasoning, greater employability, economic development, and fuller participation in society.
This is the model institutions find easiest to use. If literacy is a stable skill, it can be defined. If it can be defined, it can be divided into competencies. Competencies can become learning outcomes. Learning outcomes can be assessed. Assessments can produce scores, certificates, course credits, and categories of people.
The autonomous model turns literacy into something an institution can administer. Digital literacy is frequently presented this way. Students are expected to acquire a standard collection of abilities that will supposedly travel with them into college, employment, and civic life. The applications may change, but the institution still imagines a transferable substance called “digital literacy” residing inside the individual.
This model is useful. I make part of my living teaching within it. It is also incomplete.
The Ideological Model
Street’s ideological model begins somewhere else. Literacy is not merely a technical ability stored inside an individual. It is a social practice embedded in particular relationships, institutions, purposes, histories, identities, and distributions of power.
That means literacy is plural and lowercase: many literacies, not The Literacy (i.e., autonomous model). The literacy used to complete a tax form is not the same practice as the literacy used to interpret a religious text, participate in a group chat, maintain a medical chart, write computer code, create a meme, or decode the emotional politics of an Instagram comment section. These practices may share tools. They may all involve reading and writing. But they do not operate according to one universal set of rules.
The Netflix series Adolescence gives us a disturbing example of vernacular digital literacy. Detective Inspector Bascombe and the other institutional adults can see the emojis exchanged beneath social-media posts, but they cannot interpret what the symbols mean within the young people’s social world. Bascombe’s son has to explain the coded layer. The adults can recognize the characters on the screen. They are not technically unable to read them. What they lack is membership in the community that gives the symbols their meaning.
An emoji does not carry one permanent definition. Meaning depends on who is using it, where it appears, what has already happened, and which community is reading it. A heart may be affection in one context, mockery in another, and membership in a coded ideology somewhere else. The scene dramatizes Street’s argument powerfully. Literacy is not simply decoding a visible sign. It is knowing what that sign does inside a particular social relationship.
The adults’ illegibility is also partly functional. Vernacular codes help communities recognize insiders and exclude outsiders. Young people continually create language that parents, teachers, police officers, employers, and algorithms cannot immediately interpret. If the adults master it, the community modifies it, abandons it, or moves elsewhere. This does not make vernacular literacy innocent or inherently progressive. A community-generated literacy can sustain friendship, creativity, humor, and mutual aid. It can also transmit misogyny, racism, conspiracy theories, cruelty, and violence.
The Literacies an Institution Can See
A college sees the literacies it is equipped to recognize. It can see whether a student formatted a document correctly, selected a suitable chart, cited a source, or submitted a file in the required format. Those practices are visible to the learning-management system and legible to a rubric. The college may not see the student translating for family members, administering an online community, comparing sellers across digital marketplaces, editing videos on a phone, maintaining a multiplayer-game guild, or interpreting the shifting language of a peer network.
These activities do not automatically satisfy the objectives of a digital literacy course. They are not substitutes for the professional codes students came to college to learn. But they are evidence that students do not arrive without literacy. They arrive with literacies the institution may not recognize.
That changes the instructional problem. The question is no longer:
“How do I give literacy to people who lack it?”
The better questions are: Which literacies do my students already practice? Which literacies does the institution require? Who benefits from those requirements? Which additional codes will give students greater agency? And how can I teach an official code without pretending it is the only legitimate one?
Students deserve explicit access to the sanctioned literacies that control employment, education, and public life. Refusing to teach those codes does not weaken their power. It merely reserves them for people who learned them somewhere else. I should teach students how to write the professional email, build the spreadsheet, evaluate the source, and navigate the institutional portal. These are real, practical, sometimes bill-paying skills.
But I can teach them honestly. I can say: This is the code employers currently reward. This is how the institution expects the document to look. These conventions are enforced, but they are not natural. You can learn them without mistaking them for proof of superior intelligence or moral worth.
Digital literacy from above gives us standards, assessments, credentials, and access to institutions. Digital literacies from below give communities ways to communicate, create, resist, conceal, belong, and sometimes harm.
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