http://www.ncte.org/governance/literacies
@banana29 just came back from the OLA super conference (where she presented this). Thousands of librarians from all across Ontario (and Canada) came together for a huddle. They are pretty keen technologists and aren't remotely Luddite, but one of their issues was using the word LITERACY to describe a lack of familiarity when using technology. Literacy is not the right word, we need something a with better etymological roots.
A lot of other words are trying to describe the gap we are beginning to see between people who use technology effectively and those who are used by it. 21st Century Fluencies is a big one, but it's a mouthful.
Literacy, numeracy; we need a *acy word to link to technological skills in the same way that literature was linked to *acy in our last big media evolution in order to describe the important new skill set needed around reading and writing.
Digeracy might work. It implies a wider connection to digital fluencies and doesn't point to a single platform or skill set. Cyberacy doesn't have enough consonants in it for me, and technoracy doesn't work because it points to too broad a concept (this isn't about technology as a whole but rather the digital evolution of information).
Digeracy points to a person's fluency in digital environments. Their ability to understand the flow of information and how to interact with it efficiently. While familiarity with hardware and software might help in specific instances, digeracy refers to a wider comfort level with digital information.
A person with high levels of digeracy is able to pick up new equipment and quickly work through its strengths and weaknesses in order to optimize their use of it. They are able to access information in a variety of software environments and quickly understand the capabilities of the digital tools they are given.
Someone with digeracy might specialize in various bits of software and hardware, but they have developed sufficient breadth of skill that they are able to pick up any digital device and make it sing. Their comfort level is sometimes seen as magical by others. This extends beyond individual devices and platforms to knowledge of how to make best use of networks as well.
Like a fluent reader and writer with literacy, or a mathelete with numeracy, the technologist with digeracy is comfortable enough to swim in the digital ocean, to experiment with what they haven't seen before and quickly come to terms with it.
