Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1
PhD student of Art Research, Department of Art, Kish International Campus, University of Tehran, Kish, Iran.
2
Professor, Department of Advanced Studies in Art, School of Visual Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
3
Assistant professor, Faculty of Art, AL-Zahra university, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Visual literacy or digital visual literacy has become an important essential skill for users of new technologies in the digital age. Visual literacy is a name that refers to a set of visual skills that are developed using human vision. The development of these competencies forms the basis of learning. A person with these competencies has developed the skills to recognize and interpret visual movements, objects, symbols, and other things around them.
Many disciplines are effective in the field of visual literacy. These are disciplines such as art, education, linguistics, philosophy and psychology. These disciplines are influenced by the development of human visual knowledge, visual learning, visual thinking and visual communication. The theoretical foundations and theory of visual literacy also originate from these fields. Visual literacy includes visual learning, visual thinking and visual communication, and as a field of academic research and teaching, visual communication is a little more than 50 years old.
The world of visual communication has been fundamentally transformed by the influence of digital media. The range of users of new technologies are professionals, the general public, past generations and children who grow up with these technologies. Accordingly, digital capital has emerged as a new type of capital and serves as a bridge to receive other capital in all fields.
Depending on the field in which it works, and at the cost of more or less expensive transformations that are prerequisites for its efficiency in the field in question, capital can manifest itself in three basic ways: as economic capital, which immediately and can be directly converted into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights. As cultural capital that can be converted into economic capital under certain conditions and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications. And as social capital, consisting of social obligations ("relations"), which can be converted into economic capital under certain conditions and may be institutionalized in the form of aristocratic titles.
Digital capital is the accumulation of digital competencies (information, communication, safety, content creation and problem solving) and digital technology. Like all other capital, its continuous transfer and accumulation tends to maintain social inequalities. In Bourdieu terms, we may define digital capital as "a set of internalized capabilities and talents" (digital competences) as well as "externalized resources" (digital technology) that can be historically accumulated and be transferred from one arena to another. The level of digital capital that an individual possesses affects the quality of the Internet experience (the second level of the digital divide), which in turn may be "transformed" into other forms of capital (economic, social, cultural, personal, and political). In the social field, it therefore affects the third level of the digital divide. But in an unimaginably complex future, a non-digitally advanced person, however sane, would not be able to access the tools of wisdom that would be available to even the least intelligent digitally enhanced human.On the other hand, the digital divide, despite the previous simplification, is a multidimensional phenomenon that is related to complex issues that involve all aspects of social life in the economic, political, cultural and social arenas.
According to Bourdieu's field theory, a change in one field or habitus necessarily leads to a change in another. Due to digital capital, there have been changes in economic, cultural and social fields. Therefore, changing the habitus is an essential requirement to reduce hysteresis in the field.
Hysteresis is a term Bourdieu used to indicate the cultural lag or mismatch between habitus and changing "laws" and regularities of a discipline.
Using Bourdieu's field theory, we suggest that in order to reduce the residual, the habitus of social agents in the domain of users of digital technologies should be aligned and related to the changes in this domain.
Therefore, this study explains the relationship between visual literacy skills, as a habitus to adapt social factors in contexts, and the digital divide at three levels, as an obstacle to achieving digital capital, based on Pierre Bourdieu's field theory.
Finally, according to the dialectic between habitus and capital in field, it is concluded that visual literacy as habitus will help the social agents to get digital capital and reproduce other capitals.
It will be an important factor to reduce the digital divide in the social field. On the other hand, because of visual literacy skills are mostly acquired through viewing, when the digital divide increases at levels one and two between social agents, implies social inequalities and lack of access to capital also increase. According to the result of this research, in the social field, if visual literacy be a habitus then digital divide can be an obstacle for getting digital capital. This paper has been done by descriptive–analytical method. We have gathered data by library method and have analyzed it by inductive method.
Keywords
