Digital Literacy: For Audio Engineers
Months back my peers and I shared a discussion amongst each other about how digital literacy can relate to concepts like digital citizenship or digital rights. In our discussion, we found that it is important to differentiate between literacy and digital literacy, considering that the term literacy is defined as the ability to comprehend information from a variety of mediums. For those who aren’t aware of digital literacy, we can define digital literacy as the ability to safely and confidently use digital mediums (Pangrazio, 2021). Furthermore, digital literacy, rights and citizenship can be seen in a multitude of fields of work.
To be more specific, I plan to become a professional audio engineer in the future, but how do these concepts affect me and my future career? Since we have defined digital literacy as the ability to confidently use technology or digital mediums, audio engineers utilize tons of different, unique, and complex technologies every day in order to attain a specific product. Audio engineers have the ability to fluently control these instruments or technologies and as well must be able to troubleshoot whenever something goes awry. They also must have a decent to strong understanding of media platforms, considering a lot of engineers are their own boss, they must have ways to attain clientele effectively. To add to that, audio engineers must understand storage and file formats, whether or not they want to upload their digital products to the cloud or keep it physical and so on. Essentially, a strong understanding of digital literacy (and experience/practice of course) goes a long way in a heavily technology influenced field.
What about digital citizenship and rights? How do these relate to audio engineers? For starters, digital rights are a common thing for audio engineers considering that they must acquire various sorts of licenses for their products. Digital licenses can be viewed as rights since companies are providing you the right to use their products safely. We can tie this idea into digital citizenship as well. If we view the digital license as a form of digital citizenship, we can assess that our use of the product is our digital right. Licenses like Avid, LLCs, certifications, etc. all provide audio engineers with certain digital rights that are essential to their job.
What if an audio engineer didn’t have any licenses? Well if they have no licenses that almost always means that they are either not using digital mediums or they are pirating software and tools, which is highly frowned upon. If an artist, producer, engineer or anyone who wants to make professional audio, intends to be professional and work with high paying clients or companies, those clients or companies may require you to be legally licensed for the products you are using. On top of that, these “cracked” softwares may cause harm to audio engineers sessions or computers. The way we can view this through the scope of digital literacy, is that if you are unlicensed or pirate software, you are at greater risk than those with licenses for these software, and aren’t in as good of a position. Essentially parallel to how things would work in real world scenarios.
As technology advances day by day, we must look to the future to see what may change or impact us. Technologies like AI can be harmful to us, and this is because audio engineers can be expensive services, AI is a cheap tool made to be used by anyone. AI also doesn’t seem to require any form of digital rights or citizenship, since it's not a technical entity, but how might this change? Audio engineers may anticipate that AI can be better controlled, and even become a reliable tool for them to use in specific situations, but of course the option to abuse AI may still be common. It's hard to say what the future holds for us audio engineers, since the future can be quite unpredictable.
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