Digital Participation, Surveillance, and Agency: Insights into the Role of Digital Literacy to Manage Risk

Abstract

This paper contributes to our understanding of digital inequalities, and the empowering role of digital literacy. We report on a study examining the social media related information behaviours of Muslim women within a Muslim nation that provides insights into the role of digital literacy to circumvent sociocultural boundaries and manage risk. Social media provides our participants with an important source of everyday information, and important medium for social connection and personal expression; however, our participants use of social media is closely monitored and controlled by family, and in particular, by husbands and/or male relatives. Carefully managed privacy settings and pseudonym accounts are used to circumvent boundaries and move between social and information worlds, but not without risk of social transgression. Findings contribute to our conceptual understanding of digital literacy including social, moral, and intellectual aspects.