Is Higher Education Adequately Building Capacity To Foster “Digitial Citizenship”?
We are experiencing a digital hive-mind in these the early decades of the twenty-first century as manifested by the speed and spread of participatory cultures created by online user-generated content. Currently, this manifestation is being ideologically and commercially sold as a utopian vision unfolding with unquestioning certainty. However, are we sweeping away our familiar yesterdays in our rush to embrace global digital cultures? North American scholarship has adopted the rhetoric of “digital citizenship” as an umbrella term enfolding social participation that goes beyond just working with digital tools. This term’s ideological assumption echoes the tradition of democratic scholarship that leads us back to the social utopias of participatory democracy as expressed in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837). Emerson, in this essay, outlined the scholar’s responsibility, as a member of democratic society, to participate in the betterment of society as a whole. E...