Education
February 06, 2026
Digital literacy: the invisible condition of citizenship
Understanding, interpreting, and critically participating in the technological world has become a basic condition of contemporary life
We live in a digital era of permanent transformation. We are immersed, often almost invisibly, in a routine crossed by digital relationships of different natures: social, economic, professional, educational, and cultural. The presence of technology has become so constant and structuring that the set of behaviors, habits, and phenomena associated with network communication, access to information, and the cultural industry has come to be understood under the concept of cyberculture.
Cyberculture is not limited to tools or devices. It expresses how society organizes itself, produces meanings, shares information, and builds social practices through digital mediation. It is an ecosystem of languages, values, habits, and ways of acting that increasingly shapes everyday life.
Despite living in a largely digitized context, a significant portion of the population still finds it difficult to deal with this scenario. These limitations manifest in the comprehension, use, and critical, ethical, and effective creation of digital content, as well as in the ability to navigate, search, evaluate, produce, and share information online, or even to use basic digital tools in daily life. This gap in competencies characterizes what is understood as the absence or fragility of digital literacy.
The concept of digital literacy goes far beyond the technical mastery of tools. It concerns the ability to understand, critically evaluate, produce, and participate in social practices mediated by digital technologies. Since its earliest formulations, such as the definition proposed by writer and journalist Paul Gilster in the 1990s, the focus was already less on the technology itself and more on the critical interpretation of information. Digital literacy is not just knowing how to use, but knowing how to read the digital world, interpret its codes, recognize its risks and possibilities, and act consciously in this environment.
This perspective helps explain why some people, even without prior familiarity with certain tools, can learn them in a relatively intuitive way, while others face significant barriers. What is at stake is not just contact with technology, but the construction of repertoire, logic of use, critical thinking, and understanding of digital languages. In this sense, education plays a central role and cannot remain indifferent to the ongoing transformations. Digital literacy emerges as a fundamental condition for preparing citizens to face contemporary challenges, especially those related to new forms of communication, information, and social participation.
Social inclusion
The importance of digital literacy becomes even more evident when we observe how the digital realm has ceased to be a peripheral space to become part of the infrastructure of citizenship. It promotes social inclusion by allowing people to participate in digital routines with greater autonomy and security, strengthens educational processes, and expands lifelong learning opportunities. More than that, it redefines access to rights, services, and opportunities.
In Brazil, this movement is expressed in initiatives such as the adoption of digital drug leaflets, approved in a pilot project by Anvisa. Although the printed version remains guaranteed for those who request it, the digital leaflet expands access to information through QR Codes on packaging and allows for complementary content, such as explanatory videos and audios. The proposal aligns with a global trend of modernization and personalization of health information. However, for people with low or no digital literacy, this type of innovation can create more barriers than benefits, widening inequalities instead of reducing them.
The same reasoning applies to other ongoing transformations. The advancement of AI, the consolidation of Pix as the dominant payment method, and proposals like DREX — Brazil’s official digital currency — point to a future where money, services, and decisions will be increasingly mediated by digital infrastructures. Even today, however, many people face difficulties using banking applications and digital financial services, even in a context where organizations invest heavily in usability improvements, have design teams dedicated to intuitiveness, and apply good user experience practices. Changes of this magnitude, when not accompanied by consistent digital literacy policies and practices, tend to deepen existing exclusions.
When everything is moving towards digital, the inevitable question is: where do the people who cannot cope well with the digital in the economy, education, and social life fit in? Promoting digital literacy is, in this sense, a concrete way to ensure humans are in the loop. It is about ensuring that people remain capable of understanding, deciding, and actively participating in increasingly automated and technology-mediated processes.
This debate gains even more relevance in a context of population aging. With technological advances, especially in the areas of preventive health, life expectancy has been increasing consistently. Without resorting to ageist views, it is important to recognize that digital literacy is not an exclusive challenge for older people, but the data help to measure its importance in this group. The expressive growth in enrollment of people over 60 years old in higher education, especially in distance learning, indicates both the desire for continuous learning and the need to create digital environments that are more accessible, understandable, and welcoming.
Recent data from IBGE show that most of the Brazilian population already has internet access. However, the main declared barrier is not infrastructure, but the capacity for use. Millions of people remain disconnected or underutilize digital services simply because they do not know how to use them or do not perceive their relevance. In many households without internet access, the main reason is not cost, but the fact that no resident knows how to use it.
In a country with a strongly mobile-first profile, where the cell phone has consolidated as the main means of access to the internet, digital technology already structures fundamental economic and social practices, such as access to banking services and public policies. At the same time, this use remains concentrated in entertainment activities, such as voice and video calls, social networks, and digital media consumption, with income and schooling acting primarily as access determinants, rather than direct determinants of usage patterns.
Elderly
In the case of elderly people, studies indicate that digital inclusion and the development of digital literacy are associated with the reduction of loneliness, increased social participation, improved self-esteem, and positive impacts on cognitive domains such as memory and attention. Many remain on the digital margins not due to a lack of resources, but because of the absence of skills that allow them to use technologies autonomously and safely. The right to literacy and digital literacy should, therefore, be understood as an extension of the right to lifelong education, especially relevant in an increasingly digitized society. Despite this, instruments capable of consistently assessing digital literacy are still scarce, and tools developed and validated specifically for the Brazilian context are practically non-existent. This gap highlights the mismatch between the speed of digital transformation and the ability to understand, measure, and address it in a structured manner.
Promoting digital literacy does not just mean teaching the use of technologies. It means creating conditions for social participation, the exercise of citizenship, autonomy, and improvement in quality of life. It also implies reviewing consolidated myths, such as the idea that generations considered “digital natives” would automatically be digitally literate. The recurring difficulty of young people in performing “basic” computer tasks reveals that intensive technology use can coexist with deep gaps in understanding, autonomy, and critical thinking. In an increasingly digital society, digital literacy ceases to be a differential and becomes a basic condition for existing, participating, and deciding.
In a context where artificial intelligence-generated content becomes increasingly common and directly influences the formation of opinions, perceptions, and decisions, digital literacy assumes an even more strategic role. It helps people identify, question, and critically interpret content produced or mediated by other technologies, even when this distinction becomes increasingly subtle and difficult to perceive, even for digitally literate individuals.
More than recognizing tools or techniques, digital literacy involves the understanding that the digital environment operates through its own dialects, some explicit, others implicit, that shape narratives, meanings, and behaviors. Just as in any language or culture, understanding these codes (their uses, intentions, and limits) is an essential condition for conscious participation, intellectual autonomy, and critical exercise of citizenship in a society deeply permeated by technology.
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Who wrote this column
Lucas Tangi
