Communicating for Sustainability in the Digital Age: Toward a New Paradigm of Literacy

Abstract

Efforts to create a sustainable future require careful and complex thinking, interdisciplinary and cross-organizational collaboration, and effective and ethical communication. However, the structural biases of digital communication technologies foster modes of thought and expression that undermine or impede these necessities. While one possible solution to this problem is digital literacy, the two prevailing paradigms of digital literacy both reproduce the myth of technological neutrality. This myth further inhibits sustainability by wrongly suggesting that digital technologies are appropriate to all communication goals and tasks. As a corrective to these models, I propose a new paradigm of digital literacy, one rooted in media ecology. The adoption of this model, I maintain, allows us to consciously co-create our social world rather than merely inhabit it.