Digital Literacies and the national broadband network: Competency, legibility, context

This article reports on findings from an ethnographic study of fifteen participant households in North Hobart and Midway Point, Tasmania. Key themes emerging from this research have been gathered up and presented through the metaphor 'digital literacy'. The first half of the article is concerned with developing a critical understanding of what is at stake in the notion, or metaphor, of digital literacy. The second half tests these understandings against our research. In our conversations with the people of North Hobart and Midway Point, we found evidence of digital illiteracy, and also evidence of the weaknesses of digital literacy as an explanatory trope. We group these findings using three themes: the presence of instrumental literacy; the illegibility of the NBN and its HSB services; and structural conditions limiting the acquisition of the NBN and its HSB services. These draw upon the digital literacy metaphor, but make its shortcomings clear, and the latter two in particular extend the metaphor from a personal deficit model to one that embraces technologies and social structures.