Digital Citizenship: Empathy, Respect and Leveraging Social Capital for Support Networks
Reading over all the materials for this assignment on digital citizenship, I was confronted by many, equally strong messages that originate in different aspects of digital citizenship. Wading through to find the message that resonated with me the most was a somewhat frustrating, baffling and revelatory undertaking.
As much as I wish my life didn’t revolve, to a point, around mental illness, it does. It is through this lens that I have come to understand how important and life-altering empathy can be. Empathy, at its core, is about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and then handling the issues and feelings present for the other person with grace and understanding. It means treating others with dignity, kindness and respect.
2020 was a difficult year for everyone and because of the universality of the struggles faced we got a crash course in empathy. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, I finally felt that the general population understood what a generalized anxiety disorder is like. And with this advent of a population wide mental health crisis I saw the recognition that we all need o treat each other gently. Through any number of memes, GIFs, humorous articles and countless conversations with others I saw the acknowledgement of our collective struggles, and in each other, the openness and willingness to act as a society to lessen each other’s burdens and lift each other up. In short most of us were, at least some of the time, good digital citizens.
To understand why empathy and respect are such integral parts of digital citizenship we to start with a definition. In their article “Social media competence and digital citizenship among college students,” Xu et al. define digital citizenship as “… a mediated guide for human behavior in a digital society (Ribble qtd. in Xu et al., 3).” Further, using Ribble and Miller’s three dimensions of the nine digital citizen constructs, they provide clarity of what that mediation entails: “…(1) Respect Yourself/Respect Others, (2) Educate Yourself/Connect With Others, and (3) Protect Yourself/Protect Others (3).” Perhaps the most succinct definition came from Josie Ahlquist in her blog post “Infusing Digital Citizenship into Higher Education:”
Most simply, Digital Citizenship is responsible technology use (2014)
If I were to explain digital citizenship to my mother, whose knowledge only extends to the very basics of tech use and the digital world, I would say that digital citizenship outlines the rules for appropriate and responsible behavior while online; how we negotiate, navigate and express ourselves in a digital setting. I would further clarify that digital citizenship is not the same as digital literacy, which for me, is the ability to access, evaluate and create various media in an online setting. Digital literacy is the “how” we engage in digital citizenship, which is “what” we do with digital literacy skills.
Digital citizenship has broad implications for effective social and political movements, community building and peer support. This becomes even more clear when we take into account social capital. Participation on social media platforms could help users from all demographics join in conversations, form connections, help with networking as well as learning, all of which help participants gain social capital (Acosta 2014).
This potential is at the very heart of participatory culture and gives voice and power to individuals to shape these conversations, encourage civic engagement and affect change. More and more emphasis is being placed on the importance of an individual’s ability to effectively engage on social media platforms in a way that leverages social capital while conforming to digital citizenship norms. It is because of this that institutions of learning and educators need to incorporate lessons in digital citizenship and encourage students to practice it.
As prevalent as social media usage is and with an increasing amount of learning being done online, the importance of social media in educational settings needs to be acknowledged. As Danielle Morgan Acosta notes in her journal article “Tweet Up? Examining Twitter’s Impact on Social Capital and Digital Citizenship in Higher Education:”
“If higher education professionals are using what students know to convey information, there may be an opportunity not only to role-model positive behaviors and assist students in building social capital, but also to contribute to the dissemination of information to students and help them become more active community participants and more engaged learners (5).”
Likely, the most successful way to teach digital citizenship is to actively encourage students to participate in both discussions as to why digital citizenship is important to social function, interpersonal relationships and communities in general, but to actually have students do. That is, have students practice through engagement in both class and campus settings. Grounding in participation would also serve the purpose of making lessons on digital citizenship personal to each student.
And this is where empathy and respect enter the discussion. While empathy can’t be taught and respect can’t be counted on to be a given, it is much more likely that these two qualities will evolve from personalization, once the realization that the person/people that are a part of their conversation are living, breathing people, with feelings, needs and wants just the same as they do. As 2020 demonstrated we absolutely can’t take for granted or discount the importance of these two aspects of digital citizenship. So many of us would have been lost in a world that already felt isolating.
And though the collective sentiment about 2020 seemed to be some variation of it being one, big dumpster fire, there is a silver lining - that for those of us who self-isolated, practiced social distancing and just generally turned into hermits realized the importance of basic human contact. Sometimes the importance of a thing isn’t realized until you no longer have it.
As a result of feeling cut-off from those we love many of us turned to social media, messaging apps and video calls to supplement the contact that was missing. We created unconventional support networks online that are still crucial to our well-being. And we learned to validate ours and others struggles. In her blog entry titled “The Lessons in Digital Empathy We Learned in 2020,” Ahlquist describes this phenomenon well:
“[2020] has brought us … a newfound respect for the importance of a strong and humanizing digital strategy, and last but certainly not least, we’ve learned to build, strengthen and echo empathy throughout our communities, especially in how we communicate online (2020).”
Life has been, at times, extremely surreal for me, and also sometimes crushingly difficult. I don’t imagine I am the only one still dealing with the fall-out from this past year. Most of us, in our own ways, leveraged our social capital to reach out to others, to share burdens, lift each other up and make life feel less lonely and overwhelming. I am grateful for everyone in my life who did this with me. This is the essence of digital citizenship for me- mutual respect, caring and empathy. These have made all the difference in the world to me.
