5.1 Introduction
The Find My iPhone app serves a lot of functions, not the least of which is to reassure users of the whereabouts of their family members and loved ones. The feeling that someone can’t be reached or that they may not have made it home is anxiety-inducing, and it sets your mind at ease to see their photo dot strobing in GIS software on your phone. Like many apps, Find My iPhone blackboxes ways that physical/material-practices (e.g., walking home and entering your home) happen in digital spaces. I have inserted blackbox into the book a few times, and to situate this word, I am referring specifically to the term ‘blackbox’ as coined by Bruno Latour, who describes ‘the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success’ (Latour, Reference Latour1999: 304). Find My iPhone is a telling example of the ways that physical and digital place coexist, overlapping with each other, in a physical-digital universe.
Community WhatsApp chats, Facebook groups, and Instagram are some of the many shared digital places that bring people together, whether they live on the other side of the planet or next door. These platforms provide a home for chat, shared interests, and a chance to create a distraction from other parts of life, if only for a moment. I know that I send my friends Lisa and David in Canada a cartoon every day on Instagram and they send me one back. It is a small thing, but nonetheless a meaningful act to me during good, bad, lonely, or average days, and it ties me to them. This chapter examines the ebb and flow between digital and physical places/homes by wedging open the cracks and crevices of screen life, and the ways in which screens shuffle people fairly fluidly between physical and digital homes. The chapter, therefore, also moves into ways to unsettle a binary between digital and physical spaces. Burnett and Merchant (Reference Burnett and Merchant2020: 33) have helped us to unsettle ‘established ways of thinking about meaning, suggesting that meaning may in fact be distributed between people and things, and thus even more unstable than once thought’. As scholars, Burnett and Merchant (Reference Burnett and Merchant2020) put a language and logic to porous virtual and physical spaces. Their language and logic help me add texture and depth to the ways that crescent voices and others find belonging in physical spaces, like running into neighbours at the local store, or sharing a moment in your day on Facebook.
The notion of ‘digital home’ is an intriguing concept because it can come in many different shapes and sizes. WhatsApp groups, Instagram threads, and digital homes can be matched and coexist with physical twins (e.g., the physical crescent and the crescent WhatsApp group).Footnote 1 Digital twins to physical things/places/people motivate common practices, beliefs, and habits. This has been the case for a while now, but it was especially the case during Covid-19, when communities came together to care for their more vulnerable members. Social media gave communities ways to organize care for people who lived close by, whether it was by fetching groceries or making mental health check-ins. Crescent voices talked about these care practices and their increased time online looking after people on the crescent and adjacent streets.
Now is probably a good time to define ‘community’ in a postdigital way. I lean on Dezuanni’s (Reference Dezuanni2020) definition of community, which has three key elements that I expand upon later: (1) it demonstrates an understanding of the ways that pedagogies function; (2) it exhibits friendship, trust, and emotional investment online – despite not meeting in person; and (3) it reduces social distance to remain peer-like (Dezuanni, Reference Dezuanni2020: 60). I find Dezuanni’s definition of community – as shaping pedagogies, exhibiting friendship, and reducing social distance – helps highlight the ways that online spaces feel like home. The theme of the online/offline duality runs throughout this chapter, but I qualify that they are not binaries and instead twins at either side of a continuum.
This chapter begins by explaining the notion of physical-digital place as two parallel universes, before moving swiftly onto strands of this concept spread across interviews with crescent voices, and ending with a coda by Samuel. Unsettling the relationship between people and things (Burnett & Merchant, Reference Burnett and Merchant2020), it is helpful to unpick the ways the pandemic led people to depend on government-made apps. The NHS app, for instance, became an essential tool in households not only to identify surrounding Covid cases, but also to pinpoint and monitor our own Covid cases. Covid-19 taught us many things, and certainly prominent among them is how agentive screens are in keeping track of humans across places and spaces, as well as how close the relationship is between screens and information. In the United Kingdom, phones were tied to mobile government geographic information systems that tracked movements during the pandemic. Covid apps were platforms entirely centred on physical/digital place, documenting where you were and had been, alerting you when you had been exposed to someone with the virus. These place-bound dashboards do not easily conjure ideas of home and comfort, yet they strongly illustrate the thread that joins virtual to physical place.
5.2 Unsettling Place
I’m not entirely confident that the participants in my research can be classed strictly as a community, yet there is a good deal of friendship and trust between them, and they all live on the same crescent, which lends a sense of common identity. In this chapter, I envision these seventeen people as anchored to the physical crescent and, for some, to its digital twin, the virtual crescent assembled through WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages. In this way, place becomes mobile, on the move from the stone balustrade and iron railings of the promenade to the newsfeeds, walls, timelines, comments, likes and dislikes, and friends on the crescent Facebook page. Every participant at some point during our conversations talked about making or maintaining contact with someone on the crescent, either through social media platforms as participatory structures (Dezuanni, Reference Dezuanni2020) or in-person encounters like running into people on the crescent while sitting on a bench, sweeping their front steps, or walking home. Hay (Reference Hay1998) maintained that it is through our thoughts and practices that rituals and place-specific actions consolidate and become habituated. Place makes me think about attachments, belonging, and our affective relationships with spaces that move beyond cognition into emotions and embodiment. Place-based attachment and a sense of belonging also remind me of texts that people return to, or as Kucirkova and Cremin express it (Kucirkova & Cremin, Reference Kucirkova and Cremin2020: 26),
whether reading for the first time, or repeating an encounter with a text, we necessarily embed the textual experiences inside the events and understandings of our local life at the time. It is not an optional extra; it is woven into the experience itself … We read our own worlds into the words of our books, and these worlds will not be subtracted from the understanding we develop from the texts.
Here Kucirkova and Cremin refer to both physical and digital texts and, like Burnett and Merchant (Reference Burnett and Merchant2020), they unsettle a disconnect between the two. Texts of all kinds and genres embed themselves into experiences and senses of place. Maybe I am taking liberties with their claims, but there is some truth to texts being places that we turn to. What exactly does it mean to be connected to and aware of a distributed physical-digital place?Footnote 2 Associations with digital-material place and attachments to screen homes carry memories and relationships that are parts of local lives, woven into experiences. To be a proper home means feeling and thinking about it as familiar, associative, and memory-laden. Shouldn’t a home have some or all of these traits to really be called a home?
5.3 Understanding Physical-Digital Homes
Extending the previous section that unpacks physical-digital homes/places, I will step briefly outside the crescent research to revisit a young person named Cole,Footnote 3 whom I have written about before (Rowsell et al., Reference Rowsell, Maués, Moukperian, Colquhoun, Burnett, Merchant, Simpson and Walsh2017). Cole was fourteen years old when I met him, and as a teen who enjoyed videogame worlds and researching about game design, he made me think about the notion of physical-digital homes. Like Samuel (my authorial companion), Cole spent hours playing Minecraft, mostly on his own. He was a part of a two-year research study from 2015 until 2017 on reading and autodidacts.Footnote 4 Cole became a key lead participant during our digital reading research because he designed Minecraft worlds with such care and devotion – in particular, I remember his medieval Minecraft world. Acquiring information about his game designs on digital media platforms like TED Talks and YouTube, Cole designed themed worlds – like his medieval one – and these worlds took on a life of their own. Cole often reflected on the comfort he experienced playing Minecraft. There are many digital literacy researchers who have written about the notion of digital homes and digital comfort that children develop over time within game-based and virtual spaces (Bailey, Reference Bailey2021; Dezuanni, Reference Dezuanni2020; Potter, Reference Potter2012). In Dezuanni’s research and writing (Reference Dezuanni2020), he recognizes the ways that children and young people coexist both in the worlds of games like Minecraft and outside game worlds, in physical settings, curating information as Cole did by assembling resources to design virtual worlds and spaces. The significance of these researchers and their work is that they showed how physical-digital mobilities across ludic,Footnote 5 digital worlds can motivate and affirm people without diluting their experience and enjoyment of physical worlds. For gamers and platformers, it is an interest, a ruling passion (Bailey, Reference Bailey2021; Barton & Hamilton, Reference Barton and Hamilton1998) that inspires people of all ages and stages of life. I did not have a gamer among my population of crescent voices. I certainly had digital space enthusiasts like Bianca, who loved Zoom yoga, and Sheila, who enjoyed online bridge, but it is the fluid movements across physical-digital ludic-type homes that I saw with Cole that first set me to think about the placed nature of screens. I wanted to signal this orientation to physical-digital home before I talk about crescent perspectives on screen lives.
5.4 Anchoring the Crescent in Place
Before moving onto crescent voices, however, I want to give a bit of background about the crescent as the physical place of the research so that you might better appreciate some of the crescent’s digital twins. The introduction framed a snapshot of its long history, which dates back to the mid-1700s, when an entrepreneur built a succession of attached white Georgian homes. These single dwellings gave wealthy owners a view down the valley into the harbour and beyond. Certainly, that is the feeling the buildings give even today, although most houses have been converted to rented or owned flats. The crescent remains a fancy neighbourhood in town, a privileged place in the city, though tenants and owners have become more diverse. As a foreigner and interloper living on the crescent at the time of the study, I remarked on local practices and habits that were unfamiliar to me. Unleashed dogs running along the promenade, milk delivered to doorsteps, plaques commemorating historical events or honouring famous figures who lived on the crescent; it was not my world and yet I loved watching it unfold. I come from a colonized country with fewer memorials and plaques and quite different cultural and place-based practices. The crescent displays the historical markings of the many lives lived within it, even those of its more transient occupants. Many flats are inhabited by people who move around frequently, only inhabiting the crescent for a while before moving on. I was one of these peripatetic people and had the pleasure of living on the crescent for three years. There are long timers who have lived on the crescent for some time, like Margaret, who gave me such insight into its rich history, as is clear in this longer quote:
So, in the 1900s, early 1900s, as was the case with this house, that was originally service apartments with the maids living in the attic. After the First World War, there was a lack of staff. And so, the woman who owned this house, Mrs Bradley, had to, in order to survive, ’cause she wouldn’t get the staff, had it turned into self-contained apartments, which meant that on the floors above, they were encased with their own separate front doors. And later on, in the, maybe the fifties, they were rated separately by the council. So then in my childhood, maybe only two of the basements were inhabited and then gradually over the following fifty years, they were gentrified. But then, bit by bit, the crescent changed again with people coming and going and there was a period when there were lots of artists. My mum would, maybe, she would come under that, banner, um, and teachers and writers who didn’t have the money, the inherited wealth, but, like my mother, had the opportunity to do up and live in a lovely place. And that’s what my mum did. And a lot of other people that I know who are still here were the same.
Margaret’s nostalgic account of the crescent throws into relief social orders and structures, distributed hierarchies and relationships, and a culture transmitted from one generation to the next. Places are brought to life by the people who inhabit them. And, with this phrase in mind, places shape-shift as demographics change, as historical events shift a country’s identity, and also as the steady movement to new ways of being, thinking, and acting continues its onward march. Margaret’s description of the crescent creates a fictional space that evokes another time and history. Margaret was born on the crescent and has lived there her whole life. She is a crescent institution with a deep sense of its ups and downs, as well as all the colourful lives lived on the crescent.
Margaret is also someone who made me think about the idea of a digital home. This is not to say that she agrees with the notion of a digital home – quite the opposite. Rather, Margaret sharpened my understanding of physical place as being only ever partial, as well as the idea that this is even more the case for digital place. She is in fact wary about the idea of a digital home. When we discussed Margaret’s coordination of the online crescent choir, I then appreciated some of the more dubious dimensions of a ‘digital home’. For background, Margaret is a key figure in the crescent choir, and made the decision to move it online during lockdowns. Having a singing group on Zoom proved challenging to orchestrate, though, as people kept singing over each other and not muting themselves, not to mention the many other awkward aspects of Zoom.
This Zoom choir experience made Margaret appreciate the beauty of physically being together as a community singing. For many years, she was used to walking weekly to a church around the corner from the crescent. Histories can hold people in place, and connections to a physical location – like a crescent choir – can prevent them from wanting to ever leave it lest they lose a part of themselves. In this instance, unlike some other crescent discussions, the interpenetration of physical place and digital place made crescent choir members lose a sense of place and collective identity. I base this on reflections from three members of the choir (Margaret, Sheila, and Esther, though I learned later that Yvonna was a member too, though we did not discuss this). Nonetheless, this disconnect between physical and digital place contrasts with the next crescent example.
5.5 Screen Home as Social Imaginary
Collette spent an hour with me talking about her move to the United Kingdom, her work in London, and most of all, her vibrant screen life. Without a doubt, Collette found a place and a home on her screens as much as on the crescent. Screens were a portal to her parents in the United States, as well as to her friends far and wide. She was different from other crescent voices in that she was less embedded in the crescent’s digital footprints, like its WhatsApp or Facebook groups, although she shared a WhatsApp group with other flat owners and renters in her building. One of Collette’s favourite digital homes is an app called Cappuccino. Cappuccino lets you record short audio messages – ‘cappuccinos’ – that you can post and share with friends near and far. The app imitates a podcast format, even adding in a musical intro, resulting in a mini version hosted by people you know and care about. Returning to Hicks’ idea (Reference Hicks2002) concerning the smallness of literacy lives, the Cappuccino app gives snippets of small moments in lives.
In her screen life, Collette moves nimbly and fluidly across platforms. She knows where to go for specific information, where to go for social interactions, and where, how, and when to find a site to solve a problem. In the following excerpt, Collette discusses a moment when Covid-19 filled the airwaves and there were endless informational feeds across platforms:
When we lived around the wharf, we had like a little Google Home Mini, so, first of all, like, I, we set my, the Google morning and night-time routine to give us the news update. So, like every night before bed, you’d say like ‘Goodnight, Google’ or whatever you say. It was Google Home Mini that gave me the first bit of news about Covid-19. And then, also, I got the BBC push notifications and then beside that, I was just like constantly Googling like coronavirus or like, for example, we went to, we went for a friend’s birthday in Paris, one weekend. So, like then all weekend I was Googling, like, Paris coronavirus, France coronavirus.
Anchored in her Google Home, Collette became obsessed with coronavirus news, setting up a raft of push notifications on her devices to alert her of the latest news updates over the very first days of Covid-19. When she talked about moving across TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and an app like Cappuccino, she displayed a remarkable familiarity and comfort in sitting within and travelling across these places. Collette existed in the physical world, but her screens, apps, and platforms held her in digital places, especially during the pandemic. Collette took solace in gathering as much information about the pandemic as she could because it gave her more of a sense of control over the precarity going on in the world. There were moments during the interview when she discussed how screens were relational, reassuring, and gave her a respite during that anxious period when the world realized that we were heading into lockdowns and ‘pandemania’.
Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor2003: 23) defines social imaginaries as ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’. Social imaginaries, he explains, work through images, narratives, and media to frame our understandings of ourselves and others. A social imaginary is not individual and specific, but instead casts a wide net as a collective consciousness (Taylor, Reference Taylor2003). Hyperaware of the spread of Covid in early March 2020, Collette moved across an array of platforms: from BBC, to Twitter, to Google, back to news push notifications and Reddit to get as much different information as possible in order to ease her anxieties. Her screen home/place can be seen as a manifestation of a social imaginary. The web took on a social imaginary for Collette that became bigger, more substantial and tapestried with each day, in her words:
Like at first it was like, oh, there’s this strange virus happening in China. And then it was like, oh my God, this is getting really big. And then I was like, oh my God, we’re cancelling our flights. And like, we can’t go see our families. And it just like exploded so quickly. And every time we were like, this couldn’t possibly get any worse, and then it got so much worse.
There is a sense here that Collette’s digital places moved from the physical world of her flat on the crescent to digital platforms and newsfeeds that set the narratives and underlying stories of the pandemic. It was the images and footage that pushed understandings about Covid. There were home-like hubs in Collette’s flat, such as her Google Home, tablet, and mobile, that worked together as an integrated system with each one having a separate set of practices. Taking seriously Taylor’s (Reference Taylor2003) contention that social imaginaries develop out of common practices moved by media, discourses, and ideas, Collette and her partner seemed to share this micro social imaginary, and to move fluidly across technologies and systems to fact-find about Covid cases. On the face of it, her description above sounds neither like home nor comfort; however, the onslaught of information eased her anxiety and consolidated their decision not to travel and to hunker down at home. I believe, actually, that especially when Covid-19 first hit the United Kingdom, Collette’s devices and their push notifications, news, and statistics offered her great comfort as well as a digital home. This is not to mention the enormous comfort she gained from the ways these devices enabled her to reach out to her family and friends in the United States.
5.6 Screen Place and Peer Pedagogies
Similarly to Collette, a couple on the crescent Isabel and I interviewed described a home-like feel to their WhatsApp groups. Bonnie and Ned are two crescent voices who were late adopters of technologies before the pandemic, but whose comfort grew as they spent more time at home during lockdowns and leaned further into their screen lives. Like Collette, their screen home was a kind of social imaginary. It was less expansive and networked as a place for knowledge and information seeking than it was for Collette, and for Bonnie and Ned, it represented more of a relational bridge to their community. Bonnie and Ned are well-connected with people on the crescent and were some of the original founders of the crescent community’s digital homes, such as the WhatsApp and Facebook groups. Both digital groups function like Taylor’s (Reference Taylor2003) notion of public space: a space where citizens communicate to develop a consensus about life, issues, news, and other things that nuance their shared social imaginary. Bonnie and Ned formed WhatsApp, Facebook, and Zoom community spaces to keep in touch and check in on their crescent neighbours, particularly those who were sheltering in place (as Tabitha did). In Bonnie’s words:
Ned said, ‘We belong to a walking group. So, we could go on a walk during lockdowns.’ He organized and set up a WhatsApp group for the crescent walkers. There are a whole bunch of WhatsApp groups for keeping in touch and we’d all, we’ve always had one. We also have a crescent Zoom group. Ned was particularly concerned about including people on the crescent who are sheltering … so he created WhatsApp groups for them.
Like Tabitha, Sheila, and Margaret, Bonnie and Ned contribute a great deal to the crescent community. They are active in the garden committee, choir, walking groups, and are known to help other people. Think of the WhatsApp groups Bonnie refers to in the interview excerpt as a figurative roof over a digital home. Stepping outside their efforts to support the community, I would like to sit with WhatsApp as a digital home space for a moment. WhatsApp has seized upon the homey, safe-seeming atmosphere that their service evokes, to add on features that further forge a peer-community-home space, not only where a group of people can chat, but also where new features encourage playful engagements between them. The increasing capacities of WhatsApp communities include the ability to edit messages, to send individual voice notes to members, and to allow sent messages to disappear after they are read. To protect WhatsApp homes, users can lock their chats to keep them private. Moreover, WhatsApp is becoming increasingly participatory and playful by allowing users to create avatars, send out polls, and produce short videos to welcome new community members. I actually admire WhatsApp more than a lot of other apps for how global it feels, as well as how much more accessible it is than other online chat platforms. Anecdotally, for instance, I share WhatsApp groups with people in Africa, Colombia, Brazil, the United States, Australia, and so on, and this capacity makes it feel inclusive, though perhaps I am naive in believing this. This brief interlude into the world of WhatsApp does not directly relate to Bonnie and Ned. However, it points toward an ethos which WhatsApp exudes for people like Bonnie and Ned (social glues), allowing them both to feel and to forge a sense of belonging online. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube are participatory peer-driven platforms that many researchers like Dezuanni (Reference Dezuanni2020) have interpreted as encouraging and sustaining interests as well as connections, and, yes, inducing comfort.
Dezuanni (Reference Dezuanni2020) analyses how peer pedagogies anchor online communities in digital places. Although Bonnie and Ned’s efforts to promote digital homes for their fellow crescent friends were not necessarily pedagogically oriented, they were playful, and centred on inviting people to move, talk, and simply be together online. In many ways, as hosts of Zoom groups and as leaders of WhatsApp groups, Bonnie and Ned fostered peer pedagogies across groups of people of a similar age and stage of life (mostly people in their sixties and onwards). They attempted to engage neighbours in their customary activities, like gardening and walking, only online through discussions. Friendship, trust, and emotional investment were at the heart of these digital homes, which provided a sentiment of the familiar: emphasizing caring for and noticing others and their needs. In other words, what fostered a sense of place on screens for Bonnie and Ned was developing belonging and care among their crescent friends: being with others at the same age and stage of life and coming to know them while sharing a collective digital space. Ironically, my most digital and techie interviewee, featured in the next section, described the ways that he and his partner made their home space tech-less and digitally detoxed.
5.7 Screen Homes and the Imagination
Another example of screen place/home comes from my conversation with Steven, who appears throughout the book. Steven prides himself on having a healthy work–life balance. Steven has many interests and hobbies including climbing and long-distance running, and to add to all of this, he is completing his master’s in data and computational science. Given that so much of his professional life is spent on-screen as a professional coder, Steven and his partner (who, as a finance person, also spends extensive time on screens) have developed the habit of reorganizing their workspace after work hours to make their physical domestic space less digital. This allows them to indulge in their many hobbies and relax without screens. After having a lengthy discussion about AI, algorithms, coding, and ways of interacting with screens, I asked him how many screens he had and where they were in his flat. Steven responded unexpectedly, saying,
So, working in tech, I spend a lot of time, like most of my workday, on a screen. I also have my master’s work as well, ongoing, which happens from home. So yeah, normally, I’ve got multiple windows open. I need multiple windows open because we’ve got a browser open to view tutorials, all that good stuff. And then I’ve got Code Editor, with a couple of code boxes open. I have some other stuff as well. So, quite a lot of screens simultaneously at work. We had our work desk areas in our lounge, which has got [a] widescreen [monitor] on it and we’ve got one [computer] upstairs now as well, and we’ve got TV, so we can both work at home. But just to find space away from screens, our screens are on a motor, and just by pressing a button, the screen slides down into a slot in the desk and disappears from view. It feels more like home when it is out of view.
This part of our discussion made me think about Lefebvre’s (Reference Lefebvre1974) spatial practices discussed briefly in Chapter 1, which are as follows: conceived space, perceived space, and lived spatial practices. Conceived spaces are purpose-built physical spaces that perpetuate social structures and social practices (Lefebvre, Reference Lefebvre1974). Think of schooling practices – such as lining up at the door to leave a classroom – as regulated practices in a conceived institutional space that produce and reproduce control and order in a classroom. For Steven, home as a place to relax cannot be associated with screen life; each needs to be distinct. Perceived space is a physical, material space seen as a place composed of objects, furniture, and so on, that signal a particular type of space (Lefebvre, Reference Lefebvre1974). Think of a museum with signage, artifacts, and written text explaining displays. For Steven, materials, matter, and the physical environment induce feelings, senses, and embodied understandings that produce a need to separate his professional and personal lives within his spatial practices.Footnote 6 Steven’s reflections about designing a screen that can be made to disappear at night works well with Lefebvre’s (Reference Lefebvre1974: 362) idea of lived spatial practices which are practices conducted in a ‘space where the “private” realm asserts itself, albeit more or less vigorously, and always in a conflictual way, against the public one’. For home to be a place where very different types of actions and perceptions exist, it needs to be a ‘space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate’ (Lefebvre, Reference Lefebvre1974: 39). Unlike Collette and Bonnie and Ned, Steven cannot abide having a screen within his eyeline after work hours as it evokes his public, professional self and impinges upon his longed-for, private sense of home and place. This example of placed screens, placeless screens, or hidden screens, leads me now to my final example of using screens to navigate and locate your physical home virtually.
5.8 Finding My Coordinates
Like Find My iPhone, GPS Coordinates is an app that locates your geographical position and identifies your coordinates on a map. It is an app that reassures people of their place in space. Anne, who uses the app during hikes to chart where she is going, is another tech-savvy crescent voice and she is my final example of the strong ties between screen place and physical place. What is more, she has a wearable device that links body to screen to place in ways that we have not seen yet in this book. Anne describes it, saying,
… it was a thing you strapped on your wrist. Yeah. And it, it didn’t show you a trace of where you are on a map. It just gave you coordinates and then you, um, linked it to your app, your account on the website, and then you could have lovely maps. But now I have on my phone, I have Ordnance Survey maps. And so, if I go hiking, I can just, you know, press a button record and then I can see exactly where [I am].
To clarify, what Anne is outlining here is that she wears a device on her wrist on which she accesses maps from her phone, which she has with her, and then plans her route as she hikes from her phone. Anne’s phone becomes an extension of her body as she navigates in forests and fields, which makes it both a mental/cognitive device to think through as well as a perceptual and sensory device guiding her by means of lines, grids, and visuals. Anne’s multimodal, multisensory work revolves around a screen and, specifically, relying on a screen to orient her movements in physical place. This is a rich example of a physical-digital place twin because the GPS Coordinates app provides precise, up-to-date, digitized versions of physical terrains as you walk through them. Through these technologies, bodies become a medium for multimodality. Apps like GPS Coordinates give screens a forum to make place knowable. A similar physical-digital practice we often see is someone driving in their car while following a Google Maps or Waze route. As these types of tools become more and more pervasive, and are increasingly worn directly on bodies – or, who knows, maybe ultimately in bodies – it will be harder to distinguish physical place from screen place. Anne uses her Coordinates app to navigate paths and forests, but it also records her movements and speaks back to her, constantly learning her behaviours and anticipating her movements. I conclude with Anne’s example because it brings us full circle back to the beginning of this chapter, and, to me, the comfort of locating people through Find My iPhone/GIS software. But, like many screen practices and applications, GIS software is Janus-faced, possessing another, darker side too: the possibility of surveilling or even stalking people. Such is the terrain of Chapters 7 and 8, though for now I will conclude by reflecting about physical-digital homes.
5.9 Takeaway: Finding Your Smart Home
A screen is not the first thing most people think about when they define home or situate place, yet screens can ease homesickness and serve as a direct line to home. Images, photo libraries, social media, and Facetiming or Zooming can make us feel placed. Screens are both place-based (Prinsloo & Rowsell, Reference Prinsloo and Rowsell2012) and emplaced in social practices and deeper understandings of home. The amount of time people spend online deepens their sense of place and indeed their comfort with screens. Whether it is a phone, tablet, or laptop, our screen home is never too far away, so much so that there are emotional rewards associated with screen place attachment. Routinized ways of being and practices enacted in digital environments – across platforms and within game worlds – engrain a sense of coming home. Push notifications, like photo montages of a summer trip made and sent to you by Google, reinforce and consolidate a sense of home and being-in-place while on a screen. What can help us to move forward as educators, researchers, policymakers, and humans is to accept the qualitative differences of place, and acknowledge the ways that social imaginaries, as collective ideas, topics, and urgencies, unfold in physical and digital lives. Access inequalities and disparities in digital affordances emphasize the significance and necessity of digital place; we often need digital places in order to survive, communicate, and work in the world. Very often, we cannot step outside the situatedness of screen life. Living within the commitments, practices, and imaginaries of screens can shape our understandings of place and form a consciousness that is a kind of home.
5.10 Postdigital Coda by Samuel Sandor
My brother bought a VR headset a few years ago, a purchase I was dubious of from the start. Although I can just about see the appeal of this technology in its capacity to transport the user to anywhere they wish, it seems to me that its most popular uses tend to drop one right back in the world again – the world, that is, that one originally wanted to escape. The most popular games and experiences in VR revolve around different places in our physical world, or alternative versions of places in our world. At best, one may be able to experience the Arizona desert but with zombies, or the Peloponnesian coast but in ancient times. Ultimately, the experience is firmly rooted and deeply referential to our current physical reality. Obviously there is an appeal to these experiences, but I think they miss the full potential of VR and, more importantly, of screens. Screens can transport us to non-physical places. It would require creativity and imagination to test whether VR is uniquely capable of this, but if it is not, I see only trivial benefits to the technology. Screens have the potential to hold an abundance of mental places, and their value lies precisely in their being non-spatial, at least not in the same way that physical places are. There have been times when I’ve left campus for a few days to escape the stress of university, but by continuing to study remotely and talk to my friends over social media, I stayed in the virtual ‘place’ of university. Sometimes, absorbing myself in a screen takes me to a digital place that is relaxing because of its non-physicality – my mind feels both outside the physical world and within this virtual world, where time moves differently, if at all.
Of course, the opposite is also true. It’s important not to rely on screen-places as a crutch, or worse, as a replacement for physical spaces, but screen-places now represent an unavoidable and often useful part of how we interact with the world. Consequently, I have realized that carefully allotting space in my world for screens, and spaces within my screens for screen-places, enriches my life. If one remains cognizant of how these non-physical places can help and hinder one’s life, one can make the most of them.
To elaborate from my own experience, as I’ve grown older, my digital environments have felt more and more overcrowded. I have more social media platforms, more contacts, and more responsibilities than ever before. I’ve realized that sometimes I need to make space to manoeuvre: to delete some apps, to let a few conversations die, and to shift a few things off my plate. The opposite can also be true, though. Having spoken to my younger sister when she first got an iPad, and to my grandfather when he first bought a MacBook, I know there can also be a sense of overwhelming emptiness. With too many features and not enough of oneself yet imbued in the screen, it’s easy to feel stranded and desolate.
A close friend once asked me why I was often slow to reply to messages, and why I seemed to find it so stressful, particularly since I hadn’t previously struggled in this way. At the time, I responded that I didn’t know, that I just seemed to build it up in my head, yet I knew my reply didn’t give the whole picture. Now I know I should have responded with Sunset Boulevard (1950) in mind; that it wasn’t me that had changed, ‘it was the screens that got small’, and there simply wasn’t as much room to breathe anymore.
