Cool for cats: being curious not careless online 

Back in November last year, at SCVO’s ‘The Gathering’, our talk came with a simple request of the audience: be more cat.  

Using Jaron Lanier’s call to action, we asked people to think about how they could maintain their cool and independence in a shifting digital landscape.  

Our session – cunningly titled ‘Digital is bad…’ – was about exploring how we can think about promoting ethical and sustainable digital inclusion. We’d spent a long time reflecting honestly that while our mission for giving people the choice to get online was ultimately well-intentioned, we needed to focus more on the insidious harms and risks that the internet brings with it.  

We wanted to think about how we can reshape the experience of being online not just for ourselves – but for the people that we support to access the internet. Our suggestion? Three simple steps to a happier universe: 

• Improve and embed media literacy in the ways that we support people at every different stage of life 

• Increase focus on preventative wellbeing strategies and understand that we all need to practice ‘digital self-defence’, and  

• Understand our role and what we can do to change things because digital inclusion is everyone’s responsibility. 

Easy, right?  

Over the next few months, I’m going to reflect on these three objectives in a series of blogs to think about our progress so far.  

Let’s start with media literacy. 

What do we mean by media literacy? 

Media literacy, for us, is about having the skills and understanding to evaluate what we see and share online. The internet is, largely, an unregulated space and often anything goes. Knowing your rights and having your wits about you can be the difference between a great experience and a bad one.  

Lots of organisations are now pulling at the threads of media literacy and its role in digital inclusion – that’s great. Ofcom is preparing a three-year plan for improving it across the UK.  

But until we all understand and can practice the key components of being responsible consumers and creators of online content, the problems we face are going to continue to spiral. Misinformation isn’t going anywhere – and neither are filter bubbles, online radicalisation, scammers, our digital footprints or unwanted contact.  

It feels as though the digital reality we exist in is at a crossroads. Technology is rapid, and that means how we use it, how we keep ourselves safe and comfortable, has to be too.  

So, what are we doing about it? 

It can be easy to trap yourself in a cycle of doomscrolling, faced with the insurmountable task of challenging the media illiteracy we see across our news feeds spilling into real life. What we see online is reflected in our politics, our relationships and in our behaviours and attitudes. We’re not going to pretend there’s an easy fix for this. There isn’t.  

But media literacy doesn’t have to be a complex, elusive topic that is difficult to address.  

In digital inclusion, we believe that everyone has a role to play in making sure people have the choice to get online if it’s right for them. With that role comes the responsibility of making sure that it’s done in an ethical and sustainable way.  

Part of that is ensuring people have the skills to understand and critically assess the things they see online. People should be able to understand how the online environment influences them and, equally, how they can influence it. By embedding these key skills in our support for getting people online we can start to make a difference both online and off.  

Our Media Literacy Pathway* was quietly launched a few months ago, based on the Media Literacy Framework from DCMS. We provide practical resources and signposting for people, whether they are working with someone or by themselves, to improve the key skills required to navigate the often-tricky media landscape of the 2020s.  

For us, it’s not enough to point out that media literacy needs to be improved. We all need to be part of the solution that makes for a happier and healthier society. That’s why we’re involved with a number of cross-sector discussions and actions to build the profile and importance of being savvier consumers and creators of content.  

Digital is a tool – an enabler. When we stop using it more than it uses us, we have a problem. Let’s confront it, and hopefully when new users of the internet fall down, they’ll land on their feet… and they can ‘be more cat’ in their own way.