Open Literacy: Games, Social Responsibility and Social Innovation: Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue of Cultural Science Journal

Publication of this special issue of Cultural Science Journal is generously supported by Tencent Research (China). Editorial work was undertaken by members of the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT, Curtin University). The special issue is co-edited by John Hartley (editor of Cultural Science Journal), Katie Ellis (Director of CCAT) and Tama Leaver (discipline lead of Curtin Internet Studies). In addition to supporting this publication, Tencent provided bursaries, scholarships and travel grants to assist presenters to attend the research symposium from which the papers derive.

We are immensely grateful to Tencent Research, especially Director Ms Xiaobing Wang and Researcher Ms Jie Liu, and to our colleague Dr Henry Li, Dean for China at the Curtin International Office and longstanding member of CCAT, who facilitated our relationship with Tencent. We would like to stress that Tencent’s involvement in the project was entirely research-oriented, and that at no point did they intervene in intellectual or editorial matters. It has been a pleasure and privilege to work with them on this important topic.

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This special issue derives from a specially convened international research symposium on ‘Open Literacy’. It brings international and local experts together to report on cutting-edge research, linking games, play, social innovation and social responsibility. Papers consider a counter-narrative to the rhetoric of behavioural harm and social danger, looking at digital media and games as affordances for community-building and the emancipation of knowledge. The papers examine contemporary digital literacy across many different platforms and cultures, as well as offline forms of play and the spaces in which fans and cyborgs, cities and nations, pursue adventures of identity and hazards of chance.

Inevitably, views will differ on the extent to which playing and games, formal and informal, online and off, can be thought of as a form of literacy. Even if it does enhance popular interpretive skills and agility, the question of balance between ‘social responsibility’ (accepting regulation) and ‘social innovation’ (transgressing limits) is often unresolved in practice. This symposium compares the experience of ‘open literacy’ in different countries, and contrasting trends of scholarship across the continents, in the expectation that cross-disciplinary and cross-border communication will offer new insights to both sides.

Open Literacy refers to the cultural uses of digital and media literacy:

Open literacy is user-centred and system-wide, ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top down’, producing unforeseen network effects that in turn change the rules of the game. Navigating ‘newness’ (not just novelty but transformational change) raises new questions:

Open Literacy links the domain of digital popular culture and entertainment, including video and online games, with that of formal knowledge, academic disciplines and education. At a time when there is increasing tension between large-scale, global connectivity on the one hand, and populations marked by division, difference and asymmetries of access on the other, it is more urgent than ever to extend participation in knowledge and social responsibility—science and civics—beyond exclusive institutions and restricted professions. Recent developments in ‘open access’ scholarship, ‘open science’ initiatives and ‘open source’ software offer new ways to update Karl Popper’s (1945) vision of ‘the open society’ for the connected age.

Figure 1

Focusing on the extension of digital capabilities among a broad global population via smart devices, apps and digital entertainment to smart users, groups and enterprises, we need to explore how opening digital knowledge systems to popular participation may boost innovation and social inclusion and responsibility.

Many media scholars are sceptical of the ‘mass media effects’ tradition of research, inherited from anxiety about earlier forms of popular media, from print to broadcasting (Przybylski, 2016). At the same time they are mindful that public debate about this topic still depends on outmoded industrial and individualist theories. We need to go beyond that paradigm, to understand the challenges of digital, online media and the possibilities for renewing knowledge systems and social groups in times of technological change and geopolitical uncertainty. In short, what do entertainment systems and knowledge systems—and their users—have in common?