ABSTRACT
Digital literacy means accessing, understanding, and appropriately using digital media in specific communication situations. Digital literacy across cultures means understanding how this access, understanding, and use vary according to the broad rhetorical and cultural patterns of a target culture. For example, in recent work that I carried out for a United States-Mexico border environmental project, we used email, FTP, and Web/Internet technologies to communicate with stakeholders. The main deliverable for this project was a collaborative test plan that I initially composed, but submitted for review to a multitude of U.S. and Mexican stakeholders, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its Mexican counterpart, SERMANAT. To help develop and review this test plan, the stakeholders needed to download the test plan document using FTP protocol over the Internet, comment on it using Microsoft Word’s review function, and send their comments back to me via email. All stakeholders were required to be literate in these technologies; that is, to have and appropriately use these digital media in order to participate in the design of the technology test plan. In addition, the test team needed to use the digital media in a cross-cultural situation, something that proved difficult for many to do.
