Digital media literacy in the workplace : a model combining compliance and inventivity

Abstract

Digital technology has become ubiquitous in the workplace, shaping socalled “new ways of working (NWOW)”. This digital turn involves changes in workers’ digital media competences. Competences are often linked to ideas of efficiency and performance, but concern issues of inclusion and wellbeing as well. This article introduces a conceptual framework that articulates two models of digital media literacy at work: one based on functional-operational skills that defines the worker as compliant, and the other based on critical-creative competences that defines the worker as inventive. This framework is used in two methodological approaches in order to study how digital media literacy is performed or articulated as compliance and/or inventivity in practices and discourses. The first approach is a connective ethnography including a workplace observation protocol and an interview guide to document employees and managers’ practices. The second one uses critical discourses analysis in order to elucidate how workers’ identities and social relations are constituted by, and constitutive of, digital media literacy discourses at work.