“Multiliteracies for Inclusive Technologies: A Case Study on Location-Based Services and Domestic Violence Survivors”

by Jennifer Roth Miller | Xchanges 12.1

Digital Literacy Possibilities for Domestic Violence Survivors

Selber (2004) advocates for multiliteracies: functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies. Functional literacy refers to basic technology skills — how to access smartphone settings to restrict and control application access, as well as safe posting practices on social media. Critical literacy is a call for technology users to consider the implicit values, beliefs, and politics socially constructed and rhetorically shaped through interfaces and applications. The final literacy is rhetorical or reflective literacy, which allows one to achieve their potential for action toward social justice. Selber’s work (2004) inspired a multiliteracies-informed analysis of several approaches to finding a safety and privacy solution for domestic violence survivors.

The first approach is centralized, top-down teaching of digital literacy skills (Finn & Atkinson, 2009). The second is the peer education based “popular technology” approach (Eubanks, 2011). The third is a smartphone application that serves as a tool to help survivors control their privacy (Walls, Dieterle, & Miller, 2016).

Finn and Atkinson (2009) describe an earlier top-down digital literacy project to help survivors and organizations better understand how technology is used by abusers to control, monitor, and locate victims. Respondents reported learning technology safety skills, however many were more scared or confused after the education and needed more information. The surveys also indicated that survivors utilized technology at a high rate. The study suggested that funding and staffing are obstacles to providing more training. Peer education was identified as a possible solution.

Eubanks (2011) presents “popular technology” as an alternative to top-down digital literacy skills education. Popular technology shifts the responsibility of teaching technology skills from organizations to peer education. Eubanks suggests organizations turn to a role of fostering “critical technological citizenship,” a social environment for learning and providing resources rather than centralized training. This was proven to develop skills that are more likely to stick.

A research team at the University of Central Florida recently collaborated to create Safely Social, a smartphone application to ease location-based services’ effect on domestic violence survivors. In observing public activities of domestic violence organizations, the team found that because neither the survivors nor the organizations understood the technology fully or had the digital literacy skills to control it, survivors were forgoing the privileges of smartphones altogether (Walls et al., 2016). Domestic violence organizations actually collect donations of old cell phones that don’t have geolocation capabilities for survivors to use, because allowing location information to be posted publicly is literally dangerous and sometimes even life threatening.