After exploring the multimodal effects of BeReal, and the way in which it foregrounds place and event, this chapter explores the work of Hayles, Barad, and Braidotti, before utilizing New Literacy Studies to explore contrastive socio-cultural and social practices. The chief focus is on teasing out a theory of digital-materiality: not only what materialities and modes are present on screens, but also what inferences, values, and agendas these materialities carry. Postdigital lives entail entirely new relationships with materialities, though this does not mean a break with the physical and embodied, since postdigital life also contains many embodied ways of engaging with screens, ones which work across both the physical and the digital. This chapter attempts to conceptualize the distinct logic that people use to understand screens, while striking at more lived understandings of literacy. Consulting crescent voices on where they find comfort in their screen lives, this chapter reconciles people’s conflicting desires to pursue a flesh-and-blood life away from screens, as well as to use their screens to manifest and actualize the real aspects of their lives.

This chapter examines the production, circulation, and reception of books in the digital landscape, comprising a complicated entanglement between bricks-and-mortar bookstores and digital technologies that transforms every aspect of the way books are produced, published, distributed, and experienced. The history of the relationship between bookselling, reading devices, publishing and printing platforms, and the shape of the literary marketplace in the digital age reveals elements of the publishing circuit that are examined along with the increasing platformization of cultural production. The digital literary sphere affects authorship and the remuneration authors receive; the increased conflation between publishing and bookselling; the tension between e-books and print, and online versus bricks-and-mortar stores; and the relationship between fan fiction and literary consumption. The literary marketplace in the digital age is one marked by flux, but also the rise of new forms of access and new meaning for books and literature in the digital age.

Chapter 16: Reading in Digital Contexts. Digital reading has now become a major form of information communication worldwide. However, discussions around digital reading, specifically in educational contexts, generate many complexities that need to be unpacked. One form of digital reading (and digital texts) involves texts that are essentially equivalent to print texts, but in a digital medium (e.g., e-books, digital journal articles, and emails). Digital reading also refers to online texts on internet browsers and various apps that involve dynamic “online texts.” Research indicates that reading fixed print texts, versus fixed digital texts, leads to better comprehension and better learning, especially with longer texts. At the same time, important distinctions are reported between reading-comprehension skills when reading “frozen” texts and when reading hyperlinked online texts. Reading online texts, while a modern requirement for information seeking, creates many unique difficulties for reading development. Research on these challenges and efforts to provide effective reading instruction with online texts is addressed. The chapter concludes with implications for instruction.