The debate about digital technology and education has moved beyond the question of basic access. Attention is now focusing on the issue of what young people need to know about technology - that is, the forms of competence and understanding they need if they are going to use technology effectively and critically. The debate now is about "digital literacy". And yet digital literacy is often narrowly defined, as merely a matter of technical skill.

In this chapter, I argue for a definition of digital literacy that goes well beyond some of the approaches that are currently adopted in the field of information technology in education. Indeed, implicit in my argument is a view that new digital media can no longer be regarded simply as a matter of ‘information’ or of ‘technology’. With the growing convergence of media, the boundaries between ‘information’ and other media have become increasingly blurred. In most young people’s leisure-time experiences, computers are much more than devices for information retrieval: they convey images and fantasies, provide opportunities for imaginative self-expression and play, and serve as a medium through which intimate personal relationships are conducted. These media cannot be adequately understood if we persist in regarding them simply as a matter of machines and techniques, or as ‘hardware’ and ‘software’. The internet, computer games, digital video, mobile phones and other contemporary technologies provide new ways of mediating and representing the world, and of communicating. Outside school, children are engaging with these media, not as technologies but as cultural forms: they are not seeing them primarily as technical tools, but on the contrary as part of their popular culture, and of their everyday lived experience. If educators wish to use these media in schools, they cannot afford to neglect these experiences: on the contrary, they need to provide students with means of understanding them. Digital literacy, in my account, is about these means of cultural understanding.