3.1 Introduction

The premise of the BeReal app is to capture unaltered, transient events during the day: moments when you are out and about, living life authentically, without filters and enhancements. The app exploits, plays with, and switches apertures to create depth of field and focus to pull you into the atmosphere of your photograph. When I used it, I took a photo in a chair in a café and my chair moved into the shot’s foreground as I moved into the background (and shared it with my only follower, my daughter, who has not accepted my invite yet). In this way, the app uses multimodal effects to focus on space, place, and events first and then the photographer/user. BeReal prompts you to take a selfie (giving you a few minutes to prepare), which it presents in a small box within the larger image of your surroundings. You are meant to share this multilayered picture with other users to say ‘This is me right now’. I suppose images taken by the app impart a sense of authenticity that moves viewers inside your life.

BeReal illustrates an undercurrent in this book about people’s incessant dance with screens across places, spaces, time, emotions, repertoires of practices, communities, and deeply entrenched ideologies, both good (compassion and love for people) and bad (intolerance, racism, and hate). The app is a telling example of the ways that physical place dances with and alongside digital place (hence the choice of Bowie song). Bobillot (Bobillot & Olivier, Reference Bobillot and Olivier2008) said: ‘The more we are surrounded by the virtual, the greater our need for real presence becomes.’ Connections I am making with this quote are twofold, really. On the one side, there lies the simple truth that people crave real beating-of-the-heart life away from screens and, ironically, on the other side, the fact that people also need the digital to make manifest the real in their lives – I am here now and see this. I appreciate that many people eschew the showing and exhibiting, but communication, platforms, and participatory structures work on a logic of showing – look, this is me, here now. I am as guilty as the next person. As I type this, I am sitting in a railway station listening to a band of older gentlemen playing Christmas music on trumpets, trombones, and flutes. Of course, I must capture this touching moment and share it with friends and family. But why? Is it because I want others to know that I am enjoying the music? Or do I need to exert my agency? Or, more positively, perhaps I just want people in my life to also appreciate small moments. I do not have an answer to this, but I know that it is important to be aware of these digital-material orchestrations.

Attending to digital-material integration of bodies, digital texts, and multiple modes in interfaces gets you closer to more lived understandings of literacy (Pahl et al., Reference Pahl, Rowsell, Collier, Pool, Rasool and Trzecak2020). Implicit to the book is a definition of digital literacy as representational, material, and embodied/performative. A key difference between digital literacy and my own paper-based childhood version of literacy is that screens really are different from books and paper, and the distinct logic people use to understand screens needs greater consideration. There is (still) an operational, one-size-fits-all feel to digital practices, which is why digital literacies are referred to as plural, as digital literacies (Knobel & Lankshear, Reference Lankshear and Knobel2003). Burnett and Merchant (Reference Burnett and Merchant2020: 3) claim, ‘The digital is routinely depicted as unitary, or free-standing, and in some way detached from the social, cultural, and material conditions of use.’ They have beautifully ‘undone’ the digital in their work to promote an authentic understanding of digital practices. They do so by carefully illustrating the many paper-screen-embodied-physical-digital ways of engaging with screens and digital texts that happen both in and out of school. Indeed, Burnett and Merchant give the field of literacy studies what the famed architect Norman FosterFootnote ¹ applies to all his designs: voluminosity. I like this term because it communicates the magnitude – the infinite volume, space, and time – that is the internet. Living in postdigital times involves liminal spaces (from physical to digital) and there is volume and dimension to screen engagements. Postdigital lives entail new relationships with materialities being in/with screens. So it is that this chapter’s framing of a digital-material dance underpins the book, which explains the chapter headings that refer to human orchestrations with screens: in, on, at, with, and against.

Finally, if you have made it this far into the book and not put it down or closed the PDF, you may be asking yourself why the comfort of screens? Yes, at the end of the book-writing journey, I abandoned Dis/Comfort for Comfort, guided by crescent voices and my own convictions. After all, unlike Miller’s well-known ethnography of beloved objects and Barton and Hamilton’s ruling passion-infused literacy practices, there are more dubious and fraught relationships with screens than there are with objects and letters. Nonetheless, I have come full circle to see that screens give comfort because more often than not it is having/seeing/being in screens that feels comforting in what often seems like precarious, unsettling postdigital times. This chapter starts with theory, exploring the work of Hayles, Barad, and Braidotti, before moving into a contrastive socio-cultural and social practices space with New Literacy Studies, then spending much of the chapter teasing out a theory of digital-materiality, and concluding with a coda by Samuel.

3.2 Turning to Hayles

A question for readers might also be, what are the practical and ideological differences between digital literacy and ‘regular’ literacy? Yes, reading and writing happen on screens. Yes, people read across tabs and interactive texts. Yes, digital texts are connected to a succession of other types of texts and these texts have words, but they also have images with colours and shapes that move across the screen, that are animated. Yes, you can talk to these texts more and more and they respond with information, even your AI-polished CV, memo, or essay. Yes, screens connect you with someone next door or someone in Bogota, or any one of a million different global possibilities. Yes, there are hidden, nefarious influences inside the web that demand vigilance and push-back. Shall I go on? Shall I mention the many ways that we lean into these rectangular objects that absorb us so much and on which people continually lose time? All of these observations are tied to qualitative differences between how I experience digitality and physicality, and this strikes me as important to this book and to what it means to be a critical learner on screens.

What is new about literacy today is the tussle between meanings in form and matter (a meaning attached to pen writing on paper or to moving one’s body to the beat of a rhythm) and meanings on screens. It is a quiet tussle, but it is nonetheless insistent, or so I think. As machines within screens become smarter by learning from us, people are losing their consciousness and awareness about the radical impact that they have, not only on communication, but also on thinking and experiencing the world. Katherine Hayles predicted this a while back. She argued (Reference Hayles2007, Reference Hayles2017) that cognition comes from embodied understandings of the world.

Let me explain my notion of digital materiality through Hayles’ theory (Reference Hayles2007) of the cognitive non-conscious. In a nutshell, ‘cognitive non-conscious’ describes the meeting of humans with machines, where humans are conscious, and machines are non-conscious but are striving to be conscious. That was a very confusing sentence, so let me anchor it in the example of buying something on Amazon. Let’s say you need a thing, whatever it is, and you scroll through options on Amazon to find it. Amazon gives you plenty of suggestions and recommendations with hyperlinked reviews. You put one, maybe two items in your digital basket, then you proceed to the check-out step. You choose where to send your purchase from your list of saved addresses, you click on the payment, and then you move on with your day. This quick-fire practice (if you use Amazon, and yes, there are a lot of assumed privileges in this example) triggers a host of other layered, networked activities behind the scenes. To name a few of these (often hidden/blackboxed) activities performed by Amazon: it collects a record of your many purchases, which it uses to determine your purchasing patterns, makes predictions of items you might want, and offers you options and additional items based on your history of previous orders. This mundane example extrapolates Hayles’ point about the conscious non-conscious (Reference Hayles2017). Screens with Google, Alexa, and Siri know full well your habits, quirks, predilections, temporal, even spatial rhythms. They call on specific social practices and these practices are shaped just as much in virtual cultures like Amazon as they are in physical contexts (see Chapter 5 on digital place). In her work, Hayles (Reference Hayles2017: 25) explains how non-conscious digital networks entangle across digital spaces, writing:

What she is describing is the cascading of meanings triggered by an action that calls on a series of processes that I think of as digital-material thinking and being. For some, non-conscious cognition processes are subtle, slow-burning influences on practices that people steadily habituate. I see the layering of inferences, proclivities, decision-making, and agendas as materialities within digitality, and these materialities move through platforms, websites, and converged media texts. Materialities vary widely; they can be design features, like font choices and screen orientations, or technical computing parts, like microchips, the backbones of screen memories and communicational processing. It is important for us as users to have a basic understanding of these materialities so that people understand a logic to designed, multimodal, digital texts, algorithms, and participatory platforms as much as an understanding of the implicit patterns and narratives in AI. Chapters 7 and 8 explore the ways that participatory structures like YouTube and Instagram work and uncover and disrupt algorithms and AI to situate a logic and language of description. By this I mean, I move inside algorithms, AI, and machine learning to extrapolate a digital-material logic to them.

The strong appeal of Katherine Hayles’ theories (Reference Hayles2017) about digital life and relationships with screens pertains to her distinctions between how machines/technology think and how humans think. There is a whole bunch to Hayles’ theorizing, but I boil it down to consciousness. Humans have it and machines don’t … yet. AI, machine learning, and algorithmic rhythms aspire to consciousness. Consciousness provides awareness: memories, feelings, sensations, perceptions, and so forth represent the domain of consciousness and these are treasured human qualities. AI platforms and affordances access, use, and distribute knowledge from infinite sources on the web, but what AI cannot do is reminisce, commiserate, or reach out and touch your arm. Hayles is clear in her writings that cognition is present in machines and cognition can be and is often distributed across machines and people. Her writings pre-date the pervasiveness of AI and algorithmic knowledge and it is much clearer today interacting with ChatGPT or Perplexity. AI thinks and the thinking gets faster and faster as time passes. But, and this is a key but: consciousness is something that evades AI. Consciousness is distinctly human. Though AI is getting closer and closer to consciousness, it is not conscious yet.

So it is that there are deeply human traits about machines. All the beauty and ugliness are brought into ways that we prompt machines; nonetheless, we humans can apprehend and evaluate beauty and ugliness in all of its manifestations where machines/screens cannot. This is where one person’s comfort on a screen is another person’s discomfort. Our (in the big capital O, Our human sense) engagements with machines are idiosyncratic and reliant as with all literacy practices on individual identities made up of pasts, cultures, opinions, histories, and circumstances. Humans deconstruct the web and I do believe that it is important to keep in mind that screen knowledge is ultimately artificial and our engagements with them are deeply human.

Returning to Hayles, she alerts us in her work that people must come to terms with what makes them distinctive, and this is human awareness of being in and of the world. Screens/machines/AI have cognition but it is non-conscious and people have cognition and speaking for myself – my cognition cannot match a machine; however, I do believe that my consciousness gives a machine a run for its money. Where we are in the history of screens is that AI is chasing down consciousness and getting closer to it. This is where our awareness of digital-materiality comes into play. Hayles (Reference Hayles2007) brings to life the ecosystems or, a different metaphor, the complex architectures within digital spaces to reveal how layered, dynamic, and complex they are; and she was one of the first scholars to not only account for aesthetics on screens, but also to explore it in tandem with the hidden codes in software. She promoted (Reference Hayles2007) a deepening and layering of digitality so as not to render it flat. It is a doing of knowledge that is a verb – the knowledging that continually happens within postdigitality. It is not knowledge that is imparted to you by a sage human – it is knowledge that we find through channels, layers, networks, systems, and rabbitholes to find an answer.

There are interconnected materials that link all components together. Back to the Amazon example: you buy an item and this purchase travels across Amazon networks, linking and looping together various, sometimes unrelated companies and corporations, even government regulatory bodies (if your purchase is international), and so on. By materialities, I mean modes that combine into a design, a bit like Kress’ notion of multimodal orchestrations (Kress, Reference Kress2010a). Sometimes materialities privilege moving images and words and, at other times, the designs are more word-based with images. Take Google Maps as an example that works on coordinates, vectors, key sites and street names that move with strobing symbols to navigate people from A to B. Materialities in this chapter and in this book also refer to physical versus digital orchestrations. This perspective builds upon the discussion in Chapter 2 about the state of play in postdigital times and how screens are part of the fabric of everyday life – those of us who have the privilege of owning and accessing screens have normalized holding them and even wearing them.Footnote ²

The practices that render computers live are multimodal and premised on a participatory logic (Jenkins, Reference Jenkins2006; Wohlwend & Rowsell, Reference Rowsell and Wohlwend2016) that mingles texts, sounds, images, videos, symbols, that are heavily converged (e.g., video embedded in an image with written text). Hayles (Reference Hayles2007: 97) differentiates books from screens through practices like storage and her elaboration on saving files to a digital cloud elucidates the qualitative literacy differences:

Just pausing to tease out Hayles’ description of online data storage illustrates a difference in material versus digital logic. Computers function on different sensory-cognitive networks (e.g., data stored locally travels far away on a cloud to be stored) which makes storage iterative and looping into varied time-spaces. Engineers and coders are fluent in computer code, the base language used in computer science, but the average user is not. Relying only on an interface, we unknowingly activate a whole world of blackboxed communication (hidden coding) that we neither fully acknowledge nor fully understand. Yet, how common is it for people to save something in a cloud? Evidently, storage is not the only difference between books and computers, but it is emblematic of digitality’s unique logic and, by extension, its particular set of social practices. The sheer voluminosity of digital texts stored on clouds, yet accessible on desks, tables, or laps, affirms that screens are widespread, both locally and globally (Brandt & Clinton, Reference Brandt and Clinton2002). What may be less obvious in Hayles’ idea of cognizers and non-cognizers is the implicit relation between mind-based practices like processing information and the representational (cognizers) and senses and the non-representational (non-cognizers). Minds understand a concept. Dogs sense a thunderstorm before it happens. These are examples of enacted conscious and non-conscious acts. Hayles (Reference Hayles2017: 56) argues that senses sometimes work the same way as algorithms work: your senses sift through an experience and choose to focus on the most crucial sensory qualities (e.g., smell or sound). In this way, senses are conscious and work together with cognition to determine what takes greater prominence in an experience. Reading and viewing a text, you are thinking and feeling – which is the strongest/loudest/most tactile/smelliest that wins to experience the text. Which sense dominates and which is subordinate during meaning-making? This thought unfolds in the next section on digital-materiality.

3.3 Digital-Materiality

This chapter attends less to the thinking aspects of screen lives and more to the doing of screen lives. What is the doing of screens? To explain it, I combine theories by Hayles with socio-material thinking (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2013) about being and becoming in the world. I suppose part of my rationale to explore the doing of screens first, before place, affect, time, and disruption, is to emphasize the multimodal and linguistic work screens demand. When working, reading, laughing at a screen, there are constant micro movements that stitch one action into another. Wohlwend (Reference Wohlwend2020) and Burnett and Merchant (Reference Burnett and Merchant2020), among others, do this masterfully by giving granular views of interactivity across digital play and the many layered spaces that people frequent as users of platforms and connected environments. I want to pause for a moment in the next paragraph to move into this concept of layered digital-materiality by revisiting some history.

Though voted down as a recognized term in the chronostratigraphic chart (Amos, Reference Amos2024), ‘the Anthropocene’ is used as a term to mark the human impact on the earth system. The age of the Anthropocene began in 1952 when nuclear bomb test residues were etched into the earth and the world came to realize human impact on the environment (Amos, Reference Amos2024). I mention this history because it links with an argument in the book that humans have a constant, active, liminal relationship with all matter. This statement is thrown into relief when thinking about two major influences on humans: nature and technology. With the steady introduction of technology over decades in the last century and into this one, the level of layered materiality inside and outside technologies should not be forgotten. What is material/physical can also be digital and vice versa. There is a digital-material continuum as stated in Chapter 1 and they coexist with/by/at/through/and sometimes against humans.

Emerging technologies that are worn on heads or wrists or tapping digits, soft robotics (microchip in fabric), and immersive worlds (like VR) place complex demands on bodies and minds (Riikonen et al., Reference Riikonen, Kangas, Kokko, Korhonen, Hakkarainen and Seitamaa Hakkarainen2020). These types of technologies force people to consider the role of the body (Hollett et al., Reference Hollett, Peng and Land2022), touch (Jewitt et al., Reference Jewitt, Chubinidze, Price, Yiannoutsou and Barker2021), movement, and materiality in learning (Kruskopf et al., Reference Kruskopf, Hakkarainen, Shupin and Lonka2021; Laakso et al., Reference Laakso, Korhonen and Hakkarainen2021). What might help is to acknowledge that screens have a material force. Bodies and screens interact within systems in complex ways. Screens are artifacts that rely on bodies to do their job. They are social as much as they are material. Also, screens move across local and global spaces (Marin et al., Reference Marin, Headrick-Taylor, Rydal Shapiro and Hall2020), and the same screen (e.g., a mobile phone) is experienced in all sorts of ways across people, populations, and landscapes. This means that it is not about the screen per se, but about the ways people use them and the digital practices that come from using them. How people understand, feel, and think through screens, and how people are embodied in them. And, by implication, the comfort, chaos, and crisis screens bring.

In this chapter I explore what is being constituted and reconstituted moving across tangible and intangible screen spaces. Digital literacy teaching should address these dynamic tangible and intangible spaces through: the handling and understanding of screens (this chapter and Chapter 7); searching and finding soul and comfort on screens (Chapter 4 and Chapter 6); participating and relating through screens (Chapter 7); finding place on screens (Chapter 5); and the darker side of being digital on screens (Chapter 9). Though crescent voices seldom saw themselves as completely separate from screens, there were many discussions about life outside them. During many discussions, there was a sense of the liminality of screen lives when the physical blurred with the digital.Footnote ³ One practical example of this is how participants in the research formed digital communities during Covid-19 to help each other with everyday physical practices – physical rites, like going to the local shop for milk – that were forbidden to those who sheltered in place.

3.4 Data as Material, Dimensional, and Blackboxed

To demonstrate people’s dance with screens, I turn to data first. Data are codes, numbers, symbols that collectively represent information. Data, as a term and concept, has a flatness to it when in fact it has voluminosity and layered literacies (Abrams, Reference Abrams2015). Data sound fairly benign, but there is much more than meets the eye. There are essential properties of data that need unpacking at this stage in the book. Property number one: data disguise information-gathering practices that people engage in all of the time by accepting cookies or sharing information with search engines, corporations, organizations, and the like. Property number two: data track where people are at any given moment through GPS software. Such information is gathered through servers collecting locations and devices like mobile phones collecting data. Property numbers three and four: modal data (as in visual, audio, tactile data) are accessed and shared knowingly or unknowingly by a photographer, viewer, speaker, communicator. Property number five: saving and storing data on a cloud adds dimension to data, but it also hides the accessibility of such files by others (albeit there are advanced and varying levels of protection and security). Finally, property number six: data-processing machines like ChatGPT collect, sort, and spit back information, sifting through endless digital information systems. So, ultimately, it is fair to say that all of these properties are not experienced in isolation; rather, they slip in and out of each other and very often inform one another. Extend this further to see properties as matter that assembles, entangles, and then separates, moving on elsewhere to do the same thing. Think of data as objects accessed, shared, with patterns interpreted and then fed out to people who understand them from their local everyday perspectives.

Digital-material theorizing plays a role in understanding data because data shared, blackboxed, and accessed are never neutral. As Pangrazio and Selwyn articulate it in their discussion of critical data literacies, ‘data literacy involves different people embracing and exploring how their own everyday cultures, practices, and technologies can be applied to data in new and creative ways’ (Reference Pangrazio and Selwyn2023: 27). Their book taught me about data literacies and specifically fostering criticality with data. Pangrazio and Selwyn (Reference Pangrazio and Selwyn2023) complement Burnett and Merchant’s argument about exploring the inner workings not only of data, but also of screens. In their words: ‘All the data that is generated and inadvertently given away through the use of digital technologies will be routed around those physical networks, cables, pipelines, trenches, and warehouses at very high speeds and very low costs’ (Reference Burnett and Merchant2020: 35). What is salient to me is that postdigital life should entail stepping back and stretching out contexts, architectures, people, companies, and ideas that sit beneath the surface to disrupt a seemingly flat objectivity to digital content. Think of postdigital life as a paper accordion: a chain of shapes that needs to be stretched out and contemplated. Charting data as layers, scales, and discourses that are material and can be seen as a paper chain allows them the complexity and multidimensionality they need to be fully understood.

3.5 Literacy’s Dance with Materiality

Reflecting on literacy studies, there is an emphasis on matter and materials. Typically this means books, but not always. Think further back, to before the Gutenberg Press, to oral traditions and storytelling. Think, too, about ancient cave drawings visualizing stories for prehistoric readers and writers. Think about movers and dancers who embody literacies through gestures and movements in space (Enriquez et al., Reference Enriquez, Johnson, Kontovourki and Mallozi2017). But, yes, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the ubiquity of print, written words were a mainstay of literacy and there remains a fairly stubborn adherence to the idea that literacy is about reading and writing words.

For the moment, though, let us stick with literacy, modes, and matter. As discussed in Chapter 1, New Literacy Studies scholars like Heath (Reference Heath1983), Street (Reference Street1997), and Barton and Hamilton (Reference Barton and Hamilton1998) interpreted how children and adults access and understand materialities like books and religious texts, and how words and symbols on paper move and circulate. Ultimately these researchers were most interested in how people made meaning from texts and practices across all sorts of contexts. Books linked to formal learning like basal readers – very often white, middle-class versions of schooled literacy – counted as official literacy more than other material forms, formats, genres, and channels. In Heath’s (Reference Heath1983) research, impromptu poems produced by a young boy in the Carolinas were found to have less currency than the rote memorization of phonemes in the local primary school. I may be generalizing, but for a long time what mattered to literacy researchers was reading and writing fluency, with an emphasis on cognition and the steady development of proficiency with words and letters, as well as the stringing together of sentences into paragraphs. This is not a criticism. It is simply what we knew and accepted at the time, largely based on psychology. The field of New Literacy Studies shifted in response to the same conceptual turns other disciplines were experiencing in the 1970s and 1980s, and began to focus more on the social and contextual aspects of literacy. NLS researchers started to consider the ways that people make meaning across a larger variety of very different kinds of texts.

When digital texts became more commonplace, screen literacy did not seem radically different at first, until theorists like Gee (Reference Gee2010) and Lankshear and Knobel (Reference Lankshear and Knobel2003, Reference Lankshear and Knobel2011) showed that words on a screen are not the same as words on paper. You cannot necessarily derive the same meaning from the same content in the same way when it moves from paper to screen. Kress (Reference Kress2003, Reference Kress2010b) and others (Jewitt, Reference Jewitt2009; Siegel, Reference Siegel2006) were instrumental in pointing this out, showing that two or more modes contribute to and co-create meaning (Lemke, Reference Lemke2002). In other words, modes have an enriching, dynamic, and multiplicative effect. Think about how a word on its own carries all of its meaning, yet when a word is paired with an image, they share the load of meaning-making. Visuals, music, sounds, facial expressions coexist in a web of meaning. Words remain very important, yet they coexist with other modes that have their own affordances and constraints. A solution to the predicament of how to research and understand multimodal literacies in an increasingly digital world – the multiliteracies framework, based on the notion of design – was proposed in 1996 by the New London Group. The multiliteracies framework set about foregrounding design as the underpinning concept of literacy/cies, as opposed to reading or writing. What this meant at the time was a seismic shift away from the acceptance of words as guiding communication to multimodal understandings of communication. The multiliteracies framework proposed that all texts have designs composed of available designs that are sometimes visual and sometimes moving image and sound-based, and that designs rely heavily on which mode has the most potential to be meaningful and what best speaks to cultural and linguistic diversity.

With the digital turn, there came a series of other conceptual turns over ten years. Once literacy researchers acknowledged and accepted multiliteracies and digital literacies as multimodal, several turns unfolded to explain the nuances of literacy practices. The recognition of multichannelled, multimodal literacy revealed the role that space (i.e., the spatial turn) plays in enacted literacy practices (Mills & Comber, Reference Mills, Comber, Rowsell and Pahl2015) and the ways that objects like books are used, understood, and valued in some spaces but not in others. Time (i.e., the temporal turn), too, became important to explain ways that people have strong, sustained connections with certain objects that inform literacy practices. Researchers like Lemke (Reference Lemke2000) and Compton-Lilly (Reference Compton-Lilly2012) theorized ways that books, objects, and matter more generally carry timescales and that these scales are important to honour for literacy learners. To offer a simple example, a learner with an enduring passion for animé might gravitate more to drawn texts over linguistic texts. By extension, and relevant for research in this book, someone might feel a stronger connection with Instagram and Snapchat because they are their primary forms of communication with friends and family. These texts, this matter, mean something to people because there is significant time invested in them and, what is more, there are skills and practices honed to use them. A final conceptual turn is the posthuman turn that tied humans with non-humans or more-than-humans and how important this is to an expansive understanding of literacy (Kuby, Reference Kuby2019; Kuby & Gutshall-Rucker, Reference Kuby and Gutshall Rucker2020; Pahl & Rowsell, Reference Pahl and Rowsell2010).

Around the same time as the posthumanist turn, researchers (Boldt and Leander, Reference Leander and Boldt2013; Ehret, Reference Ehret2018) looked to affect theory and process philosophy (Massumi, Reference Massumi2007) to explain how people experience meanings beyond those imparted through words on a page and through the affective intensities that have always enveloped and rippled through literacy events. Leander and Boldt (Reference Leander and Boldt2013) and Lewis (Lewis & Tierney, Reference Lewis and Tierney2013; Lewis & Crampton, Reference Lewis, Crampton, Zembylas and Schutz2016) wrote about emotion in literacy studies as an untapped resource for researchers to appreciate how children and young people experience literacy practices and texts across contexts. Lewis and Crampton (Reference Lewis, Crampton, Zembylas and Schutz2016) chose to refer to ‘emotion’ rather than ‘affect’, and their framing of an embodied and emotional turn in literacy aptly reflects how the field changed as it applied non-representational theory. They frame emotion as an action that involves social actors engaging with texts, bodies, and objects in spaces. In their words, ‘in large measure, education is about the desire to produce particular kinds of citizens with particular emotional dispositions, and thus enforces acceptable ways of “doing emotion” (Micciche, Reference Micciche2007)’ (Lewis & Crampton, Reference Lewis, Crampton, Zembylas and Schutz2016: 163).

Postdigital researchers ask for new critical literacies when using algorithms and these critical (often data) literacies (Pangrazio & Selwyn, Reference Pangrazio and Selwyn2023) call on far more scrutinizing about the ideas and discourses embedded in digital texts as well as digital/embodied/analogue play and orchestrations across physical and digital environments (Pettersen & Ehret, Reference Ehret2024; Stornaiuolo, Reference Stornaiuolo2020). Living and learning with digital technologies means more than typing on a keyboard and staring at a screen. To do these actions well, with proficiency, fluency, skill, and critical understanding, researchers need to examine current digital architectures to take into consideration how people move and navigate across algorithms and platforms (Nichols & Garcia, Reference Nichols and Garcia2025). The term ‘postdigital’ evokes historical continuity, reminding researchers to learn from past modes, technologies, digital habits, and ways of being. In this way, postdigitality blurs a relationship between digital and analogue texts, old and new media, and capitalism and socialism in performing digital practices.

Returning to the present research and the aims of the book, I have drawn on these conceptual turns to inform the screen lives the crescent voices shared. I appreciate that screen literacies, a bit like print literacies, are cultural and material processes. Nevertheless, screen literacies are also networked and responsive. Responsive is a gentle term for self-learning: always improving, all of the time, while we sleep and go about our days. The texts, practices, and contexts that Heath and Street documented with such careful attention are not the same texts, practices, and contexts that researchers, educators, policymakers, and, most importantly, children and young people face today. They are what Hayles (Reference Hayles2007, Reference Hayles2017) calls auto-cognizers; they have sensing, intuitive capacities to mimic, improve, and feed human meanings back to us. There is a deceptive quality to new postdigital literacy as a social practice because although books and paper can incite evil and spread hate, postdigital texts have participatory networks and invisible layers through which they continuously adjust their meanings in response to every encounter they have with humans. There is almost a competition between humans and screens to see who will figure out the other first.

3.6 The Comfort of Screens

There is voluminous research in digital literacy about children and young people’s passion for and comfort in/with screens. Tracing roots and shoots of comfort moves us into a more digital-material stance on communication. The enjoyment, comfort, and fulfilment brought by screens to people of all ages and stages has been an area of research for a long time. There are rich, compelling accounts of the stronghold that screens have on children and young people. Claims about the darker, more sinister sides of screens, such as how they are changing our minds, abound. But I side with the argument that negotiating a relationship with screens is the answer, or so I decided after speaking with people on the crescent. One of the most resonant voices on the crescent was Anne, who openly discussed her digital life and footprint. She had the following to say as she stepped back to think about her digital world:

To remind the reader, Anne is in her sixties, now retired after a long career in tech and computing, so she is especially articulate about digital properties and differential digital-material experiences. In this particular excerpt, Anne describes an ambivalence about screen life which arises from the immediate availability of information everywhere all of the time, and the feelings of claustrophobia which this can induce. Screens fill lives, adding dimension to global understandings and to our relationships with time and space. The immediacy and voluminosity of the internet make it expansive, but as Anne says, overwhelming. She alludes throughout our conversation to the apprehensions and senses ignited and fed by screens and to the mental habits that get forged over time as we use them. Exploring affect enables people to understand how ‘comfort’ is located, understood, and on the move (Marin et al., Reference Marin, Headrick-Taylor, Rydal Shapiro and Hall2020). It is clear from crescent voice reflections that comfort is not just found in a device, but in the surroundings and environments where screens dwell.Footnote ⁴ What feels palpable as I listen again to Anne’s interview are the intra-actions that happen between screens and humans. Barad (Reference Barad2003: 810) claims: ‘What is needed is a robust account of the materialization of all bodies – “human” and “nonhuman”.’ This requires an account of the ‘nonhuman’ as well as ‘human’ forms of agency, and an understanding of the precise causal nature of productive practices. Anne’s discussions about dances between physical entities like paper and screens touches on the causal natures between humans and screens.

Barad uses the term ‘intra-action’ to describe how humans and non-humans relate and coalesce as a part of ‘the ebb and flow of agency’ (Barad, Reference Barad2003: 817). Matter is not passive and immutable, but instead, it is ‘an ongoing historicity’ (Barad, Reference Barad2003: 821), an active agent in life, which is why I place it at the centre of composition, design, making, and being (Kuby & Gutshall-Rucker, Reference Kuby and Gutshall Rucker2020). The modes incorporated into designs, such as textures, colours, images, and angles, have agency in their own right, and when entangled, intra-act and become a composite of underlying agencies. Matter becomes active – a doing – as Barad (Reference Barad2003: 828) says, ‘a congealing of agency’. It is a way of conceiving dialogic meaning-making between the stuff of lives and the people who live through them. Collette, another mid-crescent voice heard throughout the book, found great solace in her Google Home during Covid-19. When the pandemic spiked her anxiety, her various devices, especially her Google Home, had attained the kind of agency Barad discusses.

3.7 Taking a Long Vision on Digital-Materiality

Lest we forget, humans have a lengthy history communicating across media, symbols, and channels, and engaging with print and different kinds of screens. A wide-angled, landscape view of contemporary communication reclaims important technological innovations over centuries. For instance, some crescent voices were quite specific about the qualitative differences between older print-based forms of communication and present-day digital ones. Anne, for example, spoke about her movements across digital-materiality and how much they shaped her everyday activities, like reading the news or going for a walk. Drawing on her technology background, Anne moved through tech history with me, from the early days of computers in the 1950s to websites in the early 1990s to artificial intelligence today. When she was working at a university in 1985, she bought one of the early Mac computers, an Apple 128 K. Anne described a gradual realization about her writing that unfolded as she transitioned from a typewriter to a computer, saying:

The labour of typewriters was a formal process; you sat at the machine and usually referred to and typed hand-written notes. Typing on a typewriter with ink ribbon did not allow room for error. Although you could fix minor mistakes with white correction fluid, it was challenging to substantially amend typed pages without ruining the look of the document. Word processing software dramatically changed the writing landscape. Suddenly there was more freedom to delete, cut, paste, and, as Anne says, the only thing that ultimately mattered was the best version of a text. Brandt (Reference Brandt2015) describes how the development of mass writing occurred as computers became mainstream, emerging at the same time as the rise of the knowledge and information economy. She talks about the ‘intensifying recruitment of writing’ on screens in all sorts of professional and personal domains, from work emails to social media posts (Brandt, Reference Brandt2015: 3). Anne’s reflections, framed by her early adoption of computers, identify a digital-material shift that happened when screen writing became more mainstream.

Anne had a long-range vision about digital habits, especially as they relate to work rhythms and a loss of screen-free equanimity. Taking a nostalgic view of sending messages, Anne says the following about the shift in professional flows of information and its consequent effect on the psyche:

On-demand information sharing relates directly to my argument: if we fail to understand both the temporal ramifications and autodidact capacities of rapid-fire knowledge, then literacy will forever be working on old principles of knowledge sharing. Algorithmic adoption as a form of modern writing and digital materiality is the new wave of literacy (Robinson & Hollett, Reference Robinson and Hollett2024), and with its ubiquitous adoption, it is as much a cognitive literacy practice as it is a material literacy practice and an embodied/sensed reflex as much as reading and responding to texts. The difference between the now-dated email and algorithmic reading and writing is that machines analyse and evaluate our response before we have even crafted it (potentially before we have even thought of it).Footnote ⁵

3.8 Experiencing Digital-Materiality

Yet, people cannot exist on screens alone. Screen life and physical life coexist in a communicational/informational ecology. To move deeper into this idea, I return to Anne, who spoke wisely about material versus digital in terms of textual orchestrations across digital-material texts and the ways that humans think, act, and feel as they move across them.

Anne recognizes that, interlaced with reading, sorting, filing, storing, and arranging the little folder icons, there is comfort in the ease of digital filing compared with paper filing. Like her transition to writing with word processing software, her move from physical to digital files brought her peace and satisfaction. There is something more to this quote, though. Namely, Anne touches on memory, or more specifically a loss of memory, as people accept that everything – well, most things – can be found online. Being able to avoid the cognitive load of retaining facts frees her mind up for other intellectual habits and pursuits.Footnote ⁶

Anne is clear about differential digital-material experiences in ways that I could never be. This is where comfort enters the picture. If I asked Anne if she finds comfort in her screen, she would probably say no, but the level of detail and care she took to describe digital-material mobilities exhibited an ease and, yes, degree of comfort across digital texts and spaces. The other crescent voice who displayed a similar level of ease and comfort (but again who is conflicted about screens) is Steven. Steven shares Anne’s keen insights about the variability of online reading. I quoted this excerpt earlier in the book, and I return to it now on the topic of experiencing digital-materiality of which Steven had the following to say:

Steven has a habit of listening to audio books or academic articles that he needs to read for his master’s programme using text-to-speech narrators. His individual reading processing, coupled with his simultaneous audio processing of a voice reading the words aloud, consolidates meanings for him. Without my prompting, Steven immediately compared this habit with reading and writing code, which he finds much easier. I learned during the interview that he has both dyslexia and a natural affinity for coding languages. This aligns well because correlations have been found between proficiency in coding and dyslexia. For example, Maryanne Wolf (Reference Wolf2007) observes in Proust and the Squid that dyslexic learners naturally gravitate toward and prefer visual pattern recognition. I am reminded, too, of another neuroscientist, Judith Willis, who writes about how digital technologies have changed the ways that people remember information. Rather than storing the memories and information, people have developed new neural pathways to locate the information, which sounds a bit like natural selection to me. It would be disingenuous to say that I know anything about neuroscience and dyslexia, but there is something compelling about Steven’s reflections and his marked preference for codes and multimodality.

3.9 Material versus Digital Reading

Very often, readers intuitively sense a difference between ebook logic (monomodality) and ibook logic (multimodality), but typically a reader will not actively compare the two experiences. With the primacy of print, and, I would add, the primacy of reading theory on the primacy of print, it has been challenging to shift mindsets about what modern reading is and can be. Co-editing an established reading journal like Reading Research Quarterly,Footnote ⁷ I observe first-hand that even though readers constantly scroll, tap, listen, speak into, and move across digital texts minute by minute, there remains a reliance on print-based, often psychologically driven ways to define and theorize reading. On many occasions, people on the crescent connected screen reading to forms of material, paper-based reading. Some voices, like Anne, were quite specific and indeed enthusiastic about the qualitative differences between paper and screen reading. Others mentioned their reflections on e-reading in passing.

Anne compared reading practices that lend themselves to paper to those that lend themselves to screens.Footnote ⁸ She was clear on this topic, as you see in this brief exchange:

This specific interview moment stood out to me, as did the comments she made just after, because Anne was expressive about her pursuit of materiality during quiet, screen-free moments. The flip side of the comfort of screens is the discomfort and even rejection of screen life. It strikes me that Anne is drawing a line in the sand between herself and screens when it comes to longer reading events, like reading newspapers and books. I was especially taken with her description of a character mentioned part way down a page in a book. What Anne speaks of here is that she likes the sense of locatedness/place in physical books that she doesn’t get in digital books. I missed the opportunity for her to elaborate, but for many, like me, the physical feel and weight of a book is important. Anne forms memories through physicality – locating content on the geography of a book page roots her in the content. It is a qualitative difference in experience that others like Tristan acknowledged.

Another interviewee, Detra, gave insight into the contrasts between material and digital reading when she said,

Drawing out Detra’s observation, there is an increasing appreciation for the simplicity of screen free time and for quieter, less demanding, linear types of texts that are just as engrossing, but that don’t force actions or responses, and that don’t intrinsically let the world in. Detra alludes to what will be discussed in Chapter 7 on participatory screen lives when she signals the echo chamber of interactive newsfeeds. Her comment returns to a point made by Carr about the age of shallow reading (Carr, Reference Carr2011) – reading shorter texts often – and by implication less sustained reading. There is a large field of neuroscience devoted to changes in human reading processes due to hybridity, hypertext, and rapid fire reading into writing (e.g., reading a text and then quickly writing a text) (Wolf, Reference Wolf2007). Wolf draws from neuroscience to explain how reading has changed over centuries, moving through early forms of reading to the developmental stages of print reading to contemporary digital reading. Detra, Stella, Bianca, Ethan, and Anne all talked about this dance across digital-material texts that are read or heard on screens, and pointed to the foundational role that screens have played in defining what reading is and can be for them.

3.10 Takeaway: Material and Embodied Response Loops

This chapter uncovered what people do on screens, because attending to the orchestrations of digital texts is a key dimension of postdigital lives. Digital-material dances involve understanding not only what materialities and modes are in play and critically interpreting their meanings and forms, but also examining what inferences, values, and agendas they carry. Addressing how bodies respond to screens is another task that we should consider when discussing how we practise digital literacy. We need to ask: What is the content? Whose voice counts? Where am I taking it? Crescent voices gave me insight into these ideas through our discussions about where they find comfort in their screen lives and how they interact with screens in terms of actions like reading. In the next chapter, I go further inside screen life to explore screens and affect.

3.11 Postdigital Coda by Samuel Sandor

I think finding a balance between our digital lives and our non-digital lives is so difficult because neither feels complete without the other. Now that this portal to the virtual world has opened, for many of us it is impossible to feel fully alive – fully real, even – without having both worlds in motion. It is not a matter of living parallel lives, but two lives so deeply intertwined and interdependent that they have become all but one. I have reached a point where I struggle to feel like the process of watching a film is really, fully complete until I log it on Letterboxd, a social media platform for recording one’s film-watching activities. Similarly, I am often disappointed to realize at the end of a picturesque outing that I haven’t taken any photos. Yet, when I find an album I truly adore on Spotify, I get a strong urge to buy a physical copy of it, as though that would realize this love. Likewise, we often think of things seen on screens as not quite ‘counting’, with varying degrees of fairness behind this intuition. To see a picture of the Taj Mahal is, naturally, not actually to experience it; many would say that to exchange texts with someone is not really to have ‘met’ them; some cast doubt on online relationships by arguing that one cannot fall in love without ‘meeting’ someone in person. Real things are rarely real enough without a record or double in the digital, while virtual things frequently don’t count unless also experienced in reality.

Of course, a part of this comes from our culture of consumption. Dual participation in physical and digital worlds means that one has to spend money and devote attention (producing money through advertising revenue) in two realms. I cannot just watch a movie, I must use Twitter to hear the discourse about it; I must pay Spotify for the pleasure of listening to Let It Bleed and Decca for the honour of owning it; I cannot just have my cake, I must rate it on Yelp too. The more that real consumption entails virtual consumption and vice versa, the more consumption proliferates through duplication.

At the same time, almost all of these doubles are avoidable. I could keep a movie-watching diary, I could use a film camera (indeed, I often do), and I could listen to music exclusively on vinyl. For this reason, these virtual doubles are not unhealthy in themselves – after all, they merely render things I would have done anyway more convenient – but they become so when they begin to drift from anchored reality, or indeed anchored digitality. Walter Benjamin discusses how ‘simultaneity’ has become ‘the basis of the new style of living’ (The Arcades Project, 1999, K3,2), seeing constant and simultaneous production-line mechanisms replacing humans in the name of efficiency. An analogous problem can be identified here, with screens. When the human element of distinctly human activities is extinguished in the name of efficiency or mechanization, reducing the experience of watching a film merely to the act of recording it, or reducing a day out merely to an exercise in photographically documenting the physical appearance of one’s surroundings, something is going deeply wrong. Indeed, I confess I have on occasion found myself feeling the urge to open Letterboxd to log a film before it has even entirely finished (an urge I find repulsive and have always resisted), or buying a vinyl and then not listening to it for weeks – both acts that have become divorced from their original motivation and context so as to become superfluous.

The world is twice as big now, and somehow, we feel we’ve got to fill both halves with life. We must find out which world to inhabit or utilize for which thing, and when. We need to avoid unnecessary and meaningless duplication. It is nice to have a souvenir of a day out with a friend, but I do not need videos of the concert I’m going to. Of course I should buy the LP of Nico’s Chelsea Girl; it’s one of the albums that means the most to me, and it makes sense to buy Joni Mitchell’s Blue since it’s not on Spotify,Footnote ⁹ but perhaps I should hold off on buying Slowdive’s new record until I’m certain I like it. It is hard to filter what is best done virtually and what is best done physically, but one must start by acknowledging the validity of each, and the interplay between the two.