Digital literacy, esports, and DIY culture: Top-down and bottom-up approaches to twenty-first century competencies in Singapore

In this article, I explore cultural conceptions and practices of digital literacy articulated in three distinct areas of social action in Singapore, a technology-dense nation. Using qualitative content analysis and interviews with 33 esports players, I compare governmental digital literacy initiatives, grassroots esports programming, and individual players’ narratives and DIY practices. I show that governmental initiatives emphasize functional and protectionist competencies such as technical know-how, computational thinking, and risk mitigation, while grassroots esports programs and individual player practices connect players to a broader range of digital-relevant competencies, including technical, informational, productive, creative, problem-solving, critical thinking, collaborative, and communicative knowledge and skills. The findings represent DIY participatory practices and cultures as crucial but underappreciated milieux in which young people develop competencies that are increasingly necessary for networked life in a digital society. I couch my analysis within a discussion of the entanglement of grassroot and DIY practices with dominant culture.