1.1 Introduction: Do Screens Have Souls?

Virginia Woolf (Reference Woolf and Kermode1941: 15) claimed that ‘Books are the mirrors of the soul.’ Can the same be said of screens? Do screens have souls? Looking beyond their batteries, microchips, and connectors, can life and soul be found on a screen? Whether it is a smartphone or laptop, screens are usually close by. Granted, many people around the world do not have access to screens, or to Wi-Fi for that matter. Digital divides and digital inequalities are important and consequential topics of significant research (see, for instance, Hargittai, Reference Hargittai2021; Selwyn, Reference Selwyn2016). Whereas this book is not specifically about digital inequalities – at least not directly – it is about screen lives and, to be specific, seventeen people’s screen lives, which animate how diverse lived screen experiences can be. The Comfort of ScreensFootnote ¹ recognizes a qualitative difference between screen lives now and screen lives a decade ago. If I had written this book ten years earlier, I would have searched for machines in humanity. Today, I am searching for humanity in machines.Footnote ² Automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and mobile emerging technologies sit in nooks and crannies all over the place and this will increasingly be the case. While I wrote this book, I realized that I am conflicted about screens, and I imagine readers are too. Yet it was a fascinating privilege to hear transgenerational perspectives on the intricacies of screen life, which tells me something about generational differences. It tells me that the book is about more than anthropomorphizing screens. This book lends a listening ear to what Deb Hicks calls ‘the smallness of people’s lives’ (Hicks, Reference Hicks2002: 33) or, in this case, the smallness of screen lives. Smallness captures ‘hidden, little, seemingly unimportant things’ (Hicks, Reference Hicks2002: 33) that people do as a part of their everyday that speak for who they are and what they value. Wisdom comes from sitting with someone to talk about what they do and how they feel on screens. The smallness of screen lives gives readers something substantial, in my view. This is the principle at work in The Comfort of Screens that I feel is an important one to share at this moment in the history of communication.

1.2 A Postdigital Condition

After the pandemic, there is a growing sense that people are moving beyond what were once recognized as ‘new’ digital skills like texting, gaming, and watching YouTube, and toward what scholars (Gourlay, Reference Gourlay2023; Macgilchrist, Reference Macgilchrist2021) call a postdigital condition. A postdigital approach moves past the belief that screens are novel, with new practices and increased forms and frequencies of information gathering, and accepts that people live, learn, and become alongside, with, at, and against screens (Burnett & Merchant, Reference Burnett and Merchant2020). Scanning newspapers, not a day goes by when digital texts, platforms, and automations are not in the news.

For example, what is hot right now, at the beginning of 2024, is banning screens in schools (Tik Root in The Guardian, 17 January 2024) – well, to be specific, small screens and, in particular, students’ mobile phones. Fair enough; I know plenty of teachers who struggle to keep students’ attention during lessons because they are constantly, furtively checking their phones. Truth be told, anyone with a phone, furtively or not, checks it often. Then, of course, there is the mighty curricular pendulum swinging back to basics – to paper and pen – to learning to ‘reclaim your brain’ (John MacArthur, The Guardian, 17 January 2024) because screen learning does not equate, necessarily, with knowledge development. I suppose there is a missed point here, which is that paper and screen are not mutually exclusive mediums of reclaiming knowledge – they can work together in a digital–analogue flow, and in fact they often do. A point of departure in this book on postdigital times is that most of the descriptions of screen life move in and out of physical/virtual and embodied/cognitive and digital/material encounters. I need to stress here that postdigital lives are typically not about binaries (e.g., physical or digital) and instead postdigital lives are made up of continua. What I mean to say here is that postdigitality is made up of infinite types of twins – holiday in a place/location and holiday on Instagram – and these twins flow in and out of one other. I am not alone in believing in this fluidity, and others have also identified a shift in the substance of digital literacy, or as Merchant (Reference Merchant2023: 158–159) describes it, a change in the topology of communication:

I, like others (Bhatt, Reference Bhatt and Jandrić2023; Gourlay, Reference Gourlay2023; Jandrić et al., Reference Jandrić, Knox, Besley, Ryberg, Suoranta and Hayes2019; Macgilchrist, Reference Macgilchrist2021), now apply the term postdigitalFootnote ³ to this moment in time with screens. So, you are forewarned dear reader, that the book approaches the comfort of screens from a postdigital lens, as I explain in Chapter 2.

1.3 The Book’s Background

Ironically, the genesis of this book began with my disenchantment with screens. Fed up with sitting in front of one during the pandemic, I wondered if I was in the wrong profession. During lulls in many online meetings, I found myself trawling through web pages, searching for nursing or therapy programs – opportunities to retrain and start a new career path. I am aware that I was not alone in feeling besieged by screens during Covid-19 life. What began to coalesce was a series of musings about people in adjacent flats who were also hunched over screens. There was something curious about sharing a wall or floor with people doing the very same thing and not having a clue who they were. I thought about iconic literacy research books that take in-depth looks at the varied literacy practices of people living in the same community, such as Mary Hamilton and David Barton’s (Reference Barton and Hamilton1998) accounts of a few streets in Lancaster, and ways that literacy practices like letter writing play a role in their lives. Brian Street (Reference Street1995), similarly, recounted unconnected types of literacy practices that took place across streets and communities in Iran. Of course, Shirley Brice Heath (Reference Heath1983) launched this tradition with close-up ethnographic views of literacy events which she documented in her longitudinal research study in the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. I did not have the time, energy, funds, or freedom to conduct an in-depth study, but I could certainly have cups of tea with kindly people who lived on a crescent and who agreed to talk about their screen lives with me. Having inspired me for years, Daniel Miller’s (Reference Miller2008) book, The Comfort of Things, an ethnography of people’s object attachments and artifacts who lived on the same street in London, played a pivotal role in my reflections about my neighbours and their screen lives.

This book grew out of the landscape of the pandemic. The basic idea came to me during my daily walks along the same promenade, in and out of lockdowns, as I looked into flats on a specific crescent. They were like fishbowls filled with people laughing at the telly, hunched over laptops, or taking pictures on their smartphones. I asked myself all the time what absorbed people in their screen lives. What hold did screens have over them? Many people were working and walking at different times on different days, yet the scenes I saw on the street and through windows rarely changed. I started to wonder if screens, as our main portal into other worlds during the pandemic, were evoking the same sense of self, of memories, of lives lived, and of comfort that books do or that home spaces and objects do.

During the early days of writing, I returned to my favourite books for inspiration: books by Kress, Hicks, hooks, Hamilton and Barton, and Miller. Miller’s is full of stories that are sad, funny, joyous, and mysterious, all told through the prism of objects – things that induce comfort. It is moving to read across Miller’s book, from the very first chapter, ‘Empty’, through to the second chapter, ‘Full’, and onwards. I have returned to this book again and again over the years and wondered if a similar book could be written about people and their screen lives. The project began with the provisional title The Dis/Comfort of Screens, and then, after speaking with enough people, I dropped the Dis/. Screens induce plenty of discomfort, but on balance it is fair to say that they are comforting.

Another iconic book I have mentioned above that served as inspiration for this one is Local Literacies (Reference Barton and Hamilton1998) by David Barton and Mary Hamilton. The book concerns reading and writing in one community in Lancaster and, like Miller’s, it is an absolute gem to read. Sadly, David Barton passed away in 2024 and so it feels poignant to have Mary Hamilton’s foreword, and to honour their seminal study in this book. Barton and Hamilton’s book covers a wide range of literacy practices of community members – like Shirley and Cliff, whose ruling passions presided over their everyday literacy practices such as writing letters or producing activist flyers displayed on community boards. As a reader, you are invited into their homes to appreciate texts and practices that signal certain types of literacies and their larger significance for local and global policies. A key point here is that these kinds of practices and people’s deep, resonant investments in them are so often wedded to passions, or as Barton and Hamilton (Reference Barton and Hamilton1998: 83) call them, ‘ruling passions’, and these very same practices hold local communities together. As Barton and Hamilton (Reference Barton and Hamilton1998: 265) articulate it:

How do ruling passions related to screens connect with place, space, and communities?Footnote ⁴ This book is about contributing to research on digital literacies, but it is also about stories of humans and screens. It really is a book about comfort, and, quite pointedly, people’s individual and vastly different forms of comfort with screens.

Increased screen time was the reality for many during Covid-19 shutdowns and restrictions. Around the world, people turned to their laptops, tablets, and phones to work and go to school; to connect with families and friends; to follow current events rippling through the world; to pursue (new) interests and hobbies; to participate and create in all sorts of ways; and to escape, for a short time, the realities of our challenging, unsettling lives. What I found in speaking with people, and this was true for all types of people: neighbours, parents, colleagues, and friends, is that they really turned to screens for comfort – to connect, decompress, learn, and be entertained (sometimes all at once). As a reader and literacies researcher, I am very interested, both academically and personally, in people’s stories, digital practices, and relations with screens; spending so much time at home during the pandemic, this interest was especially focused on the people living close by.

Miller’s ethnography examines diverse people and their love for objects in their homes. I went ‘old school’ as a researcher and put forty letters in postboxes along a crescent. I even recruited three friends to help me. This led me to seven people.Footnote ⁵ Most of the terraced houses on the crescent have flats on every floor (basement, ground, first, second, and third floors) with, on average, five flats per building. I posted on a community WhatsApp group, and I asked people I encountered while walking our dog if they would be willing to share their thoughts on the notion of screen life. In the end, seventeen magnificent, fascinating people of all ages, stages, backgrounds, and beliefs took part in this modest research study, and I am deeply grateful for their time and honesty.

At first, it is hard to put my finger on what holds these seventeen people together as a community on the same crescent. Some interviewees share similar demographic positionings while others have very distinct situations, backgrounds, and stories. What surfaced in our conversations was the comfort screens brought them – though not all of them – for all kinds of reasons. Whether they lived alone or with their partners or families, turning to a screen for companionship and solace was a force of collective identity.

What has lingered with me are phrases from participants like Anne,Footnote ⁶ who shared, ‘I don’t separate my digital world from this world.’ This does not mean that any of my participants had a neutral or straightforward relationship with screens; nevertheless, many of them found parts of their soul in them.

1.4 The Book’s Aspirations

It seems important to state up-front the book’s aspirations. This book will not enlighten you about technological skills or provide digital tips. It is not a book about computers, cyber safety, or technical aspects of digital literacy. It is not a book about digital divides, though inequalities are certainly present. It is a book about people first and their screens second. Though the book closely examines intra-active (Barad, Reference Barad2007) practices people engage in with screens, it is a book about finding human connections with screens. Intra-active as a concept lets me cast a nondualist stance on humans with screens, imbuing them with equal agency; that is, we live in a world made up of humans, yes, but also lots of other forces (e.g., screens, nature, pets, pillows). I bob in and out of theory in the book, but at its heart I want this book to be novelesque. In its efforts to identify human connections, the book pokes into the corners of desktops, tablets, and phones to explore the contours of screen habits. The book moves through the screens of people across a range of ages, stages, and circumstances who all live on the same crescent in a British city. No two screens are the same because it is what people do with them that brings screens to life. Most interviewees had apps in common (e.g., WhatsApp), algorithms coming at them, and they were tied to their shared geographical location that framed some of their internet world.

This book does not aspire to offer the field a groundbreaking theory of digital education. The book aspires to be a research novel with thought bubbles by Samuel and illustrations by Tongtong and Callum about the relationships people have with screens. The Comfort of Screens considers all aspects of screens, from motherboards, circuits, cooling fans, and batteries to the responsive loop of algorithms and performative practices on Instagram. In this way, it draws on posthumanism,Footnote ⁷ but from a careful arm’s length, which I will explain later.

1.5 How to Read This Book

I would like to take a moment to prepare you for the book. I want to say early on that I share parts of this characterization of postdigital times with other authorial voices: those of Samuel Sandor (writer), Tongtong Wang (illustrator), and Callum Tomlinson (illustrator). For background, Samuel is my daughter’s close friend and contemporary and he shared with me his reflections and consternations about the role of technologies and media as a part of his past, present, and future. Our conversations in person and over email provoked me to think more seriously about the nuances of digital life and I invited him to read chapters and to share his thoughts, as a young adult who has grown up with screens. Samuel is a burgeoning writer and his voice adds dimension and authority to themes and motifs that run throughout the book. Foregrounding Samuel’s thoughts and anecdotes in footnotes and chapter endings adds depth and breadth to chapters, functioning as intellectual and anecdotal sparks, like illustrated speech bubbles which enrich content. Samuel considers himself, with some hesitance, postdigital. Tongtong and Callum are postdigital too, having grown up with screens and platforms.Footnote ⁸ I am only partially postdigital, if that is even possible, which is why I need Samuel, Tongtong, and Callum. Being postdigital means taking for granted that screens move in and out of practices, spaces, and time fluidly and tacitly, and postdigitality has become a part of the fabric of being human. Being postdigital is less about sitting in front of screens and more about living alongside them. This is partially due to the variability of screen sizes, from ones worn on wrists, to ones held in hands, to larger ones that sit on desks.

As well as Samuel, there is the visual presence of Tongtong and Callum. I met Tongtong as a student in a master’s class on creativity and media making and I noticed her remarkable doodles and asked her if she would be willing to share her illustrations (purely out of interest). Tongtong and Callum co-illustrate pictures and she offered to contribute artwork as visual mediations of the book’s content. After conversations about the book, Tongtong and Callum decided on woodcut illustrations as their interpretations of chapter content. You see one at the beginning of this chapter and each illustration has a title by Tongtong and Callum. Woodcut-style illustrations give the book a wider lens on art and design dating back to an aesthetic that came into prominence in the Bauhaus era of Wassily Kandinsky (1860s to early 1900s) and through William Morris (1834–96), who produced woodcut paintings. Woodcut illustrations, Bauhaus influences, and a Sheffield-based figure named John Ruskin sit in the background of the book with their emphasis on reclaiming an arts, craft, and design history that marries art with society.Footnote ⁹ In the early 1800s, Ruskin railed against the harsh and arduous conditions of the industrial revolution and in an activist and disruptive response, promoted a return to arts and crafts work as moral work. I refer to this history because in many ways this book argues for a reclamation of history and design legacies that ground education in design and art (material, digital, physical, virtual). This is not to say that postdigital education is more moral than any other form of education, but it is to say that Ruskin’s vision for education grounded in craft can be a way to frame postdigital learning as sensorial, technological, social, embodied all at once, driven by intentional movements across print-digital texts. Woodcut prints in the book are visual reminders to respect varied positions and coexistent histories about communication and design. They disrupt assumptions about the separation of print and digital education, opting instead for playful, participatory design. This brief foray into a rich arts and design history surfaces critical design work featured in the book.

Returning to the book’s structure, you will hear from Samuel in footnotes labelled SS, and at the end of every chapter as codas (apart from this one and the last chapter). Samuel has written codas to extend the takeaway from each chapter with a lived postdigital voice. What you will also ‘hear’, or more accurately see, are Tongtong and Callum’s images in black and white woodcut illustrations that act as visual interludes between chapters. Tongtong and Callum share their postdigital thoughts through these illustrations, so look closely to decipher their messages. You may be wondering why I have shared authorship of this book. I suppose I felt strongly that, having written and co-written academic books about multimodality (Pahl & Rowsell, Reference Rowsell2020; Rowsell, Reference Rowsell2013), this one should be multimodal and multivocal – as much as a printed book can be – and the authorial voices should understand postdigitality in different ways than I do. The book sits with others (Pangrazio & Selwyn, Reference Pangrazio and Selwyn2023) as a call for real change in schooling: for education that lives and breathes multimodal, converged, participatory, and connected forms of learning. The shape and contours of the book should heed this call.

One quirk of this book is that every chapter after this one starts with a song lyric.Footnote ¹⁰ I wish that you could tap the lyric to hear a song recording, but that is beyond my skill set and the affordances of an academic book. I’ve included them nevertheless because these lyrics animate chapter content (or so I hope), infusing sound as a mode of learning, albeit an inferior version of the real thing. If I can ask a favour of you, dear reader, I encourage you to listen to each musical epithet in its entirety so that you can compare the content of the chapters with that of the song lyrics; and it goes without saying that songs come alive when you can hear the timbre of the singer’s voice and listen closely to the tones of the instruments.Footnote ¹¹ In the case of Chapter 2, with Samuel’s choice of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, please read the entire poem.

A final note about the book concerns pronouns. Firstly, I use the first person liberally and unapologetically. Given that the book is written as, ostensibly, a research novel, it seems appropriate to use ‘I’ throughout the book. Secondly, I use ‘you’ to address the reader, which I hope is not too chatty and informal, and I use it to make the book journey dialogic and relational. Finally, and most contentiously, I use ‘we’ occasionally, with hesitance. ‘We’ is a loud and loaded pronoun for several reasons, primary among them being that ‘we’ presumes a collective identity/background/reality which is neither true nor equitable, and second being that it signals a lack of knowledge about others and their stories and realities. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks of the danger of a single story: ‘The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they aren’t true, but they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story’ (Adichie, Reference Adichie2009). There is not one story when it comes to screen lives. I want to state up-front that I use ‘we’ and do not presume from its use that there is ‘one story’. I promise to be measured and judicious in its use.

1.6 Research Background

The history of the research study that led to this book dates back to Covid-19 lockdowns. The featured crescent is in a fancy part of a British city and has a long stretch of white, terraced, Grade II listed housesFootnote ¹² with a promenade in front. Most people living on this crescent own or rent flats and they are largely white middle-class households, but this is not the case for all. There is some racial, cultural, and social class diversity across the spectrum of participants. Of the seventeen people I interviewed, six rented a flat, ten owned a flat, and one owned a full house and rented out the top two floors.

The research interviews typically took place in people’s homes, with two in local cafés and one on a bench on the crescent promenade. All were carried out over four months from April to September 2022. Set questions that framed each interview discussion focused on screen practices, screen experiences, and the participatory structures involved in screen life. Like most interviews, conversations took their own paths, often winding and moving in unpredictable ways that made them interesting, personalized, and, might I say, sometimes touching. People’s stories can be poignant, and as a researcher, I was humbled that people opened up to me. For some interviews, I had Isabel Lang,Footnote ¹³ a doctoral student, alongside me. She provided research support and gained training in interview methods. I conducted this research in the corner of my life, outside my job,Footnote ¹⁴ and I only say this as a reminder of how committed, connected, and invested I feel about the research. Coming only from a small pot of internal funding that helped me to pay for ATLAS.ti data analysis and that provided funds to buy book vouchers for participants, this book is not a large, funded research project. Rather, it is deceptively simple research done on a shoestring budget, though I would argue that its impact is just as generative.

The research mostly focuses on screens and the everyday and is grounded in a tradition of literacy research known as New Literacy Studies (NLS) that comes at literacy from a strong social practice tradition.Footnote ¹⁵ Studies by Heath and Street paved a way for researchers in the late 1980s to see literacy through social, cultural, political lenses. At the heart of the NLS tradition is literacy practice as a term, which is the production of literacy identity in relation to social structures and cultural worlds. Reflecting on seminal NLS studies, in Heath’s 1983 ethnography Ways with Words – about Trackton and Roadville in the Piedmont region in the Carolinas – worlds come alive in the ways that literacy practices in homes informed what gets understood and enacted at school. Heath’s (Reference Heath1983) work maintains its relevance and purchase today because readers get front row seats to see how the intricate and veiled ideological ways of reading, writing, singing, telling stories, and sharing texts shape literacy behaviours. Learning about how Roadville mothers enact stories with their babies and how African American children perform spontaneous poems in Trackton gave literacy researchers at the time, and into today, new ways of thinking about how people live through their literacies and, conversely, how communities get framed in particular ways because of their literacy practices. But, since the time that Heath, Street, and Barton and Hamilton wrote their respective books, the world has changed enormously and screens have ascended. Their ethnographies were very much place-bound in ways that are not so possible today. Brandt and Clinton (Reference Brandt and Clinton2002) recognized some time ago that place-bound ethnographies render opaque the ‘Ariadne’s thread’ between the local and the global. By this I mean it is hard, if not impossible, to exist in exclusively local places due to technologies and media. I pursue this theme more in Chapter 5.

What helped me apply a language and logic to the anecdotes of the crescent voices (as I name all research participants)Footnote ¹⁶ is Street’s (Reference Street1984) framings of literacy practices in the marketplaces and mosques in Iran, and the ways that those actions and implied texts produce formative, localized understandings about communication. Street’s ethnographic findings (Reference Street1984) recognized that literacy practices shape-shift to contexts and to the functions of literacy. Street (Reference Street1984) demonstrated how literacy is shaped by the contexts in which practices occur and that literacy practices are then further mediated by people’s identities. Crucial to these contextual contours of literacy are the habits, predilections, and senses of belonging that they nurture. Street distinguished between the nature and properties of literacy practices from scripted notes at stalls in the marketplace to memorizing stories in the Holy Qur’an to recite in local mosques. Since the mid-eighties, ethnographers like Heath, Street, Bloome, Gee, Kalman, Barton, and Hamilton have researched the nature and properties of literacy, entreating researchers to look closely at specific communities and learn about the idiosyncratic, contextual nature of literacy practices. The study that informs this book is not a pure ethnography and instead offers a brief inside look at seventeen people and their screen lives in a particular part of the United Kingdom. I hope its ethnographic perspective (Green & Bloome, Reference Green and Bloome1983) will position this book alongside ethnographies that document and categorize types of literacy practices as profoundly human and contextualized.

Moving back into literacy histories and lineages, by the 2000s, when it was clear that screens were already dominating social worlds, scholars like Lankshear and Knobel (Reference Lankshear and Knobel2003) introduced the idea of digital literacy. Multimodality, a term that captures how some texts communicate content through more than one mode (e.g., words on a page paired with visual images), established within NLS an integrated and dynamic way to interpret digital texts. Multimodality began with scholars like Kress (Reference Kress1997) and Siegel (Reference Siegel2006), who explained how people big and small make meaning through more than just words, and that most texts have at least two modes at work. You will hear and feel so much multimodality in this book.

What undergirds every chapter in the book are theorists that strengthen and hopefully sharpen arguments. Chapters 3 and 7 concentrate on theorizing the nature and properties of postdigital literacy practices, and the key theorists for this framing are Katherine Hayles (Reference Hayles2007, Reference Hayles2017) on non-conscious cognition and Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor2003) on social imaginaries. All theory in the book weaves together so that practices stitch with time and space, as outlined in the next section.

1.7 Time and Screens

What I did not anticipate finding on this research journey about people and screens was the profound role played by time. Initially, I set out thinking that this exploration would rely on posthumanism (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2013). That is, on the agency of screens as a constant pull for people. But, as I unpeeled postdigital layers, I struggled to reconcile what people said solely with posthumanist theory. While analysing, reading, and synthesizing literature, I realized that what people were describing, and what the research was foregrounding, was something more affective, lived, and temporal in nature. Long have I obsessed about the humanness of literacy,Footnote ¹⁷ but I figured that exploring screen lives would be somehow different and less about humans, cultures, and subjectivities; it was not. People talked about getting closer to grandchildren through their phones or silencing anxiety with an app, and somehow posthumanist theorizing about intra-actions between screens and humans did not serve me as well as theory on affect and temporal theory. This is not at all a criticism of posthumanism and new materiality because I have found sociomateriality and new materiality hugely generative (Kuby & Rowsell, Reference Kuby and Rowsell2017, Reference Kuby and Rowsell2021; Lemieux & Rowsell, 2019), but for this book and these stories, I moved into newer theoretical territories. Henri Bergson (Reference Bergson1910), Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor2003), Katherine Hayles (Reference Hayles2017), Ruha Benjamin (Reference Benjamin2019), Safiya Umoja Noble (Reference Noble2018), Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2012; Reference Ahmed2017), and of course Heath (Reference Heath1983), Street (Reference Street1995), Kress (Reference Kress1997), Hicks (Reference Hicks2002), and Burnett and Merchant (Reference Burnett and Merchant2020) anchored me in place and gave me a footing when I really needed it. Barad (Reference Barad2007) comes into my theorizing at moments, but not as much as I thought they would, because in this book I am chasing down humans in screens, and there is less of a bidirectional, intra-active feel to this enterprise.

Now, back to time. Given the amount of exposure people have to screens, it stands to reason that time has significance for screens and, without exception, every interviewee talked about time during interviews. Time in different iterations kept cropping up: screen time; losing time in digital wormholes; new temporal rhythms due to increased curation of digital information; discrete time versus multiplicities of time. Participants talked about time stopping, time surging ahead, and passing time during lockdowns. A common belief across crescent voices was that screens have led us to experience time differently.

Henri Bergson’s (Reference Bergson1910) notion of duration helps me define time in this book. What emerged for me through crescent interviews is that time is like an accordion moving in and out of past–present–future moments, instances, and memories. Think here about the feeling that you get when you lose time doing something that you love. Think of this feeling as an intuitive sense of time; or time that isn’t etched into pure memories that stand on their own. Time that breaks down the strictures of clock time. An ushering in of the past into the present unexpectedly and that moves the present back into frame. Bergson (Reference Bergson1910) is a defender of internal time worlds and argues that perception guides people’s navigation of time, which is important in relation to this book because time came up so much in interview accounts. During interviews, crescent voices talked about suddenly being faced with a memory that Google or Facebook sent. For instance, when Tabitha talked about Facebook photos from a year ago being pushed into view on her screen in ‘real’ time. Crescent voices like Tabitha and Detra spoke of going about their everyday, answering an email, when out of nowhere comes an image of a child or cousin or friend. These temporal rhythms and mobilities were a surprise to me and I remarked at their frequency during interviews.

Varied understandings and perceptions of time are involved in ways of interacting with screens. There are, for example, distinct events like searching for and finding an answer on a website or watching a YouTube or TikTok video. As Barton and Hamilton explained in 1998, and Heath discussed even further back in 1983, a literacy event is a singular act, such as sending an email to a friend. It is a discrete moment in time bounded by a specific function of literacy. In addition, there are literacy practices with longer, unrestricted timescales. In terms of digital literacy practices, this could be scrolling through Instagram or reading the BBC news app. These activities represent what Bergson (Reference Bergson1910) calls continuous time. Some literacy practices exhibit an openness that comes close to what Massey (Reference Massey2005) refers to as throwntogetherness – literacy practices thrown-together with histories and geographies which are then thrown-together with humans and non-humans. The only term that really captures all of these understandings of time and digital literacy for me is assembled literacy practices. The word ‘assembled’ allows for consuming hybrid texts across varied immersive, automated, and algorithmic platforms; texts that move in space and time, and make you lose time on your screen.

Bergson’s framing of duration makes time fall in on itself, as the past suddenly comes into the present and then slides back out of view. Think of a time when memories have flooded into your present, maybe triggered by hearing a song or holding a photo, or when you get an eerie sense of déjà vu just from walking along a street. For Bergson, the accordion-like folding of the past into the present is not restricted to durations of time, but is also found in matter. Matter holds time. Think about a photograph or a building that holds time (Rose, Reference Rose2010; Rowsell, Reference Rowsell2024). Images and architecture hold time, reminding you of historical periods, aesthetics, lifestyles, and past events. The particular crescent as the research context for this book holds time. There are artifacts along the crescent that recount past lives and people – plaques that commemorate famous authors and scientists who lived on the crescent or replacement tiles in the promenade that mark past materials, trades, methods, and building histories. Working within time and walking through time on the promenade reinforced my sense of time falling in on itself. And this leads me to the crescent as the hub of place-based literacies (Prinsloo, Reference Prinsloo2005) in this book.Footnote ¹⁸ To interpret time in Chapter 6, I apply Henri Bergson’s philosophical writing (Reference Bergson1911) about durational time as framed within placed moments on screens, profiled in the next section on digital/physical homes.

1.8 Placed Screen Lives

Just as I have tried to make research participants in the study blurry renditions of their actual selves, so too have I attempted to obscure place in the book. It is a bit futile, though, because in describing the crescent it will be fairly obvious where the research took place. Participants are aware of this risk and have agreed to take part all the same. The crescent has a long history, with durational moments that merge past with present and future in a way reminiscent of Bergson’s analysis of time. This is why the book cannot separate time, place, and space to theorize screen lives. There is a thread joining one story to another, linking time, place, space, and people. Think of place in the book as an emotional location with meanings for participants. Think of space as a geographical location. Think of physical as materialized. Think of virtual as online.

The location for this study is a crescent that looks down a valley onto a harbour. This crescent is featured in the book Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore (Reference Dunmore2017), a psychological thriller that I read as I planned the book. Dunmore’s detailed account of the construction of forty-six white, terraced, late Georgian houses with a large promenade in front helped me get inside the crescent’s property development in the late 1700s. The stately homes were built by entrepreneurs who hoped to sell them to affluent buyers. Although the narrative is fictional, the book provides a fairly accurate depiction of the crescent’s evolution and the ups and downs of financing its construction over more than fifty years. Over centuries and decades, the crescent has transformed; its large single homes were used for military housing, then converted into rental flats, then gentrified again, with flats fixed up, bought, and sold.

On this crescent, the past moves into the present through familiar features like plaques honouring events and the signature limestone pavestones in front of the houses. As Grade II listed buildings, nothing inside or outside the houses on the crescent can be changed, including the pavement, promenade, roofs, facades, and windows (unless of course you have to replace tiles on the promenade, which does happen). So, place, in the book, refers to the buildings and geography of this physical crescent, but it also envelops its virtual twins, like the crescent’s Facebook page. Place imbues meaning into time, memory, affect, and both the physical/material and virtual worlds of the crescent are places (the same place in two ways). Even without history and the associative materialities of brick and mortar, the crescent, as place, exists on screens. If place is integral to community, then all types of places spawn communities. You the reader occupy a number right now. Is it even possible to forge a community on a screen? Crescent voices claimed it is and does happen, all of the time in fact. And if it is at all possible, which it seems to be, what do the screen lives of its inhabitants have to do with the physicality of this crescent and its sense of community? As it turns out, quite a bit, especially during the pandemic. Covid-19 left many people sheltered, unable to leave their flats. Place and community turned increasingly to online place and community. Since it was not easy or wise to go to the shop for milk, people formed digital communities to provide a sense of home and safety. People missed out on social interactions and corner store chit-chat. Online communities filled this void through cooperative grocery delivery and company for those who felt lonely. Finding the local in the pandemic meant a reliance on virtual place to access local place.

What I found through this research is that it is absolutely possible to call this crescent home, yet at the same time have a virtual home on your screen. That is why place in the book carries emotional properties – during interview conversations there was often a slippage when people talked about home on the crescent and a home-feeling on the crescent’s WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok twins. Home is affective, registered on the body (Massumi, Reference Massumi2007), and in this way the physicality of the limestone pavestones and the virtuality of TikTok videos of dogs running down the promenade are equally real evocations of home for those living on the crescent.

Interviewees described how the place-based resilience of the crescent community was mobilized through physical events, like socially distanced meetings on crescent benches, and they also shared how the community signalled place through the creation of virtual homes, like the crescent WhatsApp group. One community member collected mobile numbers of any neighbours sheltering in place and delivered care boxes to their homes. These acts were not unique to the crescent, but happened everywhere. This idea that screens can be virtual homes, another layer of home and community for people already linked through their shared living space on the crescent, was palpable during discussions. And this got me interested in the main questions of this book: do screens have souls and, if they do, in what ways? Tabitha, an interviewee featured later in the book, made me appreciate the strength of virtual homes when she shared with me,

Talk about platforms having human capacities; talk about finding human soul in screens. There were plenty of similar reflections during interviews. Popular neighbourhood places had to adapt to survive the economic effects of lockdowns; some created digital twins, like a pizza app that offered pizza delivery or pizza delivery with a disco dance. In so many ways, place was liminal, existing across physical and virtual environments.

1.9 Space and Screens

Space plays a lesser role in the book, mostly to situate physical locations where screens are used. Again, the pandemic figures prominently in the role of space in the research because so much of the screen time described by participants happened at home. Home spaces changed dramatically during Covid-19 and with increasingly longer lockdown periods. Domestic spaces moved into the foreground and worlds became smaller. Henri Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre1974) is helpful here for disentangling the ways that participants experienced spaces and, to be specific, smaller spaces. Bear in mind that all participants, bar one, lived in flats. The participant who owned a full house rented out the top two floors and she was in the process of selling her house to move to another part of the United Kingdom. The smallness of spaces was a leitmotif in interviews. Another common theme was the need for new spatial configurations to enable people to live and work in smaller spaces. Carving out spots for quiet thinking and for collective activities like watching television felt like relatively new experiences for the crescent voices. Obviously, there were moments in the past when this would take place, but it was clear that spatial choreography had never been as important as it was during pandemic lockdowns.

Lefebvre’s (Reference Lefebvre1974) account of social space considers people’s everyday experiences of spaces. Moving beyond space as physical (though Lefebvre folds physicality into his triadic spatial framework), space is a mental and embodied experience. Thinking of space as constituting relationships helps my argument about screen habits and practices during the pandemic because most people existed in much smaller spaces that suddenly became almost dioramic. That is, things (sofas, tables, objects) took on much greater prominence/agency in home spaces. How many homes did you see during Zoom calls? In the wake of Covid-19, how familiar did you become with people’s cats, dogs, and toddlers who popped into the background unexpectedly during video chats? The lengthening and intensification of time in particular spaces during lockdowns gave the delineations of spaces a much stronger influence on relationships, habits, and patterns. Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre1974) anchors his theories about space on social spatial activities. His triadic approach encompasses physical space (kitchen table), mental space (thinking about a written document at a kitchen table), and social space (feeling peaceful at your kitchen table with a cup of tea). These three related components coexist and function concurrently to capture people’s experiences of environments as perceived physical places that have lightness and darkness, that are conceived through abstractions such as visual or digital depictions, and that are lived through imaginations. Body and embodiment run throughout each strand of Lefebvre’s framework. For example, fingers perceive the letter keys on a keyboard, one’s interpretation of meanings in a photo or written text are conceived, and a memory ignited by hearing a song on your phone is lived. Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre1974) insists that because everything is produced by nature or society, the rhythm of spaces cascades into the real, the abstract, and the felt/embodied/lived simultaneously. A web of social relations is brought to life through activities and practices in spaces; people interact, and these relations are at the same time practical and physical (like when you cook together in a kitchen) and sensory and imagined (like the warmth and intimacy or distance and awkwardness felt during a conversation). The appeal of Lefebvre’s approach as an analytic tool for this research study is its malleability; it can be used to interpret all sorts of screen habits, from walking on the crescent while listening to a Zoom meeting with your video off, to scrolling through Instagram on your phone.

The vitality of combining NLS with Bergson and Lefebvre pushed my thinking and inspired me to plan and write this book. Dynamic forces, screens, objects, rooms, lighting, emotions, senses, rhythms, and imagined moments are always part and parcel of living, and these elements seemed to interact more profoundly and robustly, and certainly differently, during the pandemic. Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre1974: 12) claimed, ‘When we evoke “space”, we must immediately indicate what occupies that space and how it does so.’ In the book, space represents domestic spaces as much as it does the virtual spaces one navigates across and within, and virtual spaces can be quite complex. On a screen, you could have multiple tabs open at once in Chrome or Safari for your work, your health, a friend or family member, an intellectual pursuit, or a product that you hope to buy, all the while messages are piling up on top of one another. Each text might have a distinct design and format, and their ideas, functions, and aims can be profoundly different as well. Although they look alike – simple tabs lined up on a screen – their visual similarity makes their histories, ideologies, and communicational functions opaque, obscuring the real/felt/lived parts of each one of them, which are also vastly different.

1.10 Texts and Practices on Screens

Building off an understanding of time as intuitive, felt, and perceived; place as emotional and affectively driven; and space as physical, virtual, lived, embodied, and imagined, I consider texts and practices as the bread and butter of postdigital literacy. In this book, I deliberately combine texts with practices to emphasize the point that people experience texts and practices together and all at once in a given moment. There is affective intensity in how people experience texts with practices on screens and, in saying this, I am drawing a direct line to Massumi’s (Reference Massumi, Deleuze and Guattari1987: 10) oft-cited definition of affect as ‘an ability to affect and be affected’. So, in what ways does affect impact postdigital literacy? Not only are equally varied practices enlisted to understand different types of texts on screens, but these varied practices are sensory and embodied in ways that practices associated with analogue and physical texts are not. Photosharing, Spotifying, TikToking, Facebooking, blogging, hashtags, gifs, emojis, and the linguistic, semiotic, modular complexity of postdigitality require new language and logic to describe how people use and understand screens. Screen texts move and vibrate, they call on touch, play, navigation, scale, they integrate hyperlinks and many other quick-fire actions that people hone with time, use, and investment. Yes, printed, physical, analogue texts have their own sets of practices, some of which are similar, many of which have repertoires that call on the body in variable ways such as the role of touch in digital texts (Jewitt et al., Reference Jewitt, Leder Mackley and Price2020, Reference Jewitt, Chubinidze, Price, Yiannoutsou and Barker2021).

The best way to clarify what I mean is to offer an example from a participant. Steven offers one of the best illustrations of the closeness between texts and practices. In the middle of our interview, Steven reflected on his experiences across an array of texts during an average week in Covid-19 lockdown. Steven started with a jazz app that he used during the pandemic because he could not attend guitar lessons in person. He would use the app, play his guitar, and document his reflections about his practice sessions post-lesson. Then, he proceeded to talk through his reading preferences across analogue and digital texts and discussed them based on genres of texts (e.g., books versus magazines versus academic articles). Here is a small excerpt from our conversation:

For news, Steven opts for an audio text to listen to as he does things around his flat or outside. For his academic work, he reads articles and books on-screen because he has yet to find an app that lets him read and listen (in the way that he likes). Steven also told me that for climbing, as he could not meet his climbing club, he attended lectures on Zoom. He also emphasized the visual and semiotic practices of coding, another set of texts and practices. Admittedly Steven is one of the more techie crescent voices I met. Nonetheless, in this excerpt alone, there are five texts wedded to five distinct practices (scanning The Economist; listening to the jazz app; watching climbing Zoom sessions; reading academic articles; and, coding on the NHS and military intranet). Never in the history of communication have there been so many texts with so many distinct and discrete sets of practices available so readily. It is hardly surprising that literacy education, specifically, and certainly broader education cannot keep pace.

Based on interviews with random people on the same street, I can put my finger on four foundational properties of screen lives that are often hidden: (1) the plane of reception (the screen interface) or the meeting point between human and screen is diverse, complex, and moves across platforms and networks; (2) there is constant digital-materiality in screen lives – an interplay across physical and digital spaces and places (i.e., screens are not the centre anymore, but coexist and coalesce with physicality); (3) texts on screens ignite senses, affect, and bodies; and (4) for literacy research on screens, the unit of analysis is not words, but words and other modes at play (text, images, sounds, colours, moving images, etc.). All four foundational screen properties are borne out in the chapters and foregrounded in the conclusion.

Let’s start with the experience of having a screen in front of you. Even when nothing is open, there are places, times, spaces, and texts facing you, ready to be launched and enacted. Perhaps the same can be said for books on a table or paper to be written on, but with both these older technologies, the mobilities around the texts and the actions used to engage with them are more confined. A paper book needs to be physically opened, held, read, pages turned, time invested in the story to finish it or to move forward and backward across the book. This is not so with a screen. On a screen, you can open folders, files, or Chrome or Safari, look at a picture, watch a video, and so on and so forth. You slide across and often pile up these digital spaces and most of them are multimodal texts (i.e., with visuals or sounds). Even documents that contain solely words still have different levels of headings that organize space on the screen, or different fonts or colours, and there is a close succession between the text and the practices people use to activate them, like typing or swiping or scrolling or tapping. This is where the digital divide comes into play. People with 24/7 access to digital technologies and robust Wi-Fi can perform these practices with ease, with little to no effort or fuss, and their efficiency builds up over time. When internet drops or equipment breaks, it is a hiccup that is often brief and simple enough to fix. But, in many areas of the world, especially the Global South, it is a luxury to have robust Wi-Fi, let alone the opportunity to improve practices through regular access to computers and screens. For people in the Global North, and for the crescent voices in this book, however, access to digital technologies and screens could be taken for granted.

This book mainly centres on the dance between physical, print-based texts, and screens. Researchers have analysed and written about increased mobilities and materialities across physical/virtual and material/digital spaces (Burnett & Merchant, Reference Burnett and Merchant2020; Hollett & Ehret, Reference Hollett and Ehret2017, Reference Hollett and Ehret2019; Ma, Reference Ma2016a, Reference Ma, diSessa, Levin and Brown2016b), about digital literacy being on the move (Macgilchrist, Reference Macgilchrist2021; Marin et al., Reference Marin, Headrick-Taylor, Rydal Shapiro and Hall2020). Most chapters in this book account for digital movements and mobilities in terms of texts and practices, but they also address how many of these digital movements and mobilities involve physicality and materiality. The only way to illustrate the importance of bodies, physicalities, and digital spaces to texts and practices is with a simple lived example. You don’t often see someone reading a book in the middle of a pavement; you wouldn’t think twice, however, about someone stopping in their tracks to text on their phone, much to your annoyance as a fellow pedestrian. The book explains this second of the four texts and practices of screen lives – digital-material movements in homes and in communities – to underscore our postdigital sensibility.

Over the past few years, with Sandra Abrams, Mark Shillitoe, Harriet Hand, Steve Pool, and others, I have pursued an embodied, sensory line of thinking, researching, and writing about the tacit sensory ways that people of all ages and stages move about the world. This work involved interviewing people about their objects (Rowsell & Abrams, Reference Rowsell and Abrams2021); engaging in intergenerational arts creation work with children, young adults, and middle-aged people (Hand, Rowsell, & Shillitoe, Reference Hand, Rowsell and Shillitoe2022; Rowsell & Shillitoe, Reference Rowsell and Shillitoe2019); and, developing a theory of immanence about the underserved nature of sensory learning in schools (Pool, Rowsell, & Sun, Reference Pool, Rowsell and Sun2023). All texts ignite senses and induce digital immersivity. The logic of screens is synaesthetic and deliberate. Graphic and web designers study colour palettes, screen orientations, and image coordination to elicit sensory, embodied responses and these are not (usually) overt, they are subtle. But this has always been the case. What is new lies in the amount or intensity of synaesthetic activity on screens and the closeness of the relationship between the text and the responsive action. Posthumanism and sociomateriality have been especially generative in extrapolating this difference. Instagram threads as a succession of moving, talking, and visually dynamic texts, intra-actFootnote ²⁰ with the viewer in alignment with the expectations of together creating a meaning-making encounter. Behind the scenes, Instagram’s agentive properties enable the app to figure out viewers/users’ preferences so that it can regularly send them other threads they will like; the user responds in turn, exercising their agency by letting their attention linger on certain threads or by quickly rejecting them. Meaning is made cooperatively as the user practices the texts. The term intra-act, from feminist materialist Karen Barad (Reference Barad2007), is literally a merging, a becoming, a life brought together by the two. This is the third text and practice property of contemporary digital literacy: text and practice combine in lived literacies to make meaning and they do so through obscured, sensory movements across digital/physical spaces. The role of the body and senses has increased (Boldt, Reference Boldt2020; Kruskopf et al., Reference Kruskopf, Hakkarainen, Shupin and Lonka2021; Leander & Boldt, Reference Leander and Boldt2013; Rowsell & Abrams, Reference Rowsell and Abrams2021) in our screen lives. You know how to swipe away screens and how to tap on keys quickly to send a message. You know the sound of a text coming in. You know the ding of a calendar reminder. You are aware when an email enters your inbox. That is, if you have not turned off your notifications. These sounds are naturalized in the same way a highlighted font can immediately signal that you are moving into another text or folder.

The fourth and final text and practice in the book has to do with time and place. It is more of a directive about texts and practices than an observation and it emerges from past research as well as this research study. It addresses viewing screens in a less passive way and in more of a relational, sensory, affective, and inquisitive way (Grocott, Reference Grocott2022). Lisa Grocott (Reference Grocott2022: 8) writes about design (all design, not simply digital design) as a collective enterprise, ‘a participatory process of creative engagement’. Grocott pushes against universal design work and toward design from lived experiences, design that respects pluriversal perspectives (Perry, Reference Perry2023). What is more, Grocott insists on embodied, material, affective, and artifactual practices. In her words, ‘Designing is a discursive, embodied, material practice propelled by generative moves of reflection and speculation’ (Grocott, Reference Grocott2022: 8). But it is not enough to design collectively and reflectively; engaging text and practices should trigger a sense of critical wonder (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2014), which I discuss in the concluding chapter, Chapter 9. In her book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (Reference Ahmed2023), Ahmed maintains that critical wonder invites questions, and by wonder she does not necessarily mean a neutral or even a positive force. Rather, wonder unsettles, disrupts, and questions assumptions. Practices online must do this too. Critical wonder needs to be integrated into the ways that people move across and understand screens and this approach needs to be taught overtly, cautiously, sceptically, and disruptively.

The book attends closely to some key differences (and similarities) in the logic and assumptions behind digital literacy practices and print-based literacy practices. Much of their divergence has to do with vastly different text genres (e.g., Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter versus printed magazines, novels, academic papers, etc.) which have different content as well as different types of human–text interactions. In short, our ways of making meaning with screens versus paper are divergent. I draw from materialist stances on life and scholarship, which Miller (Reference Miller2010) has demonstrated robustly in his arguments about how things, materials, and texts come into being through their relations with other things and people. Bennett (Reference Bennett2009) and other scholars also talk about the vibrancy or live qualities of matter, and a driving force of this book is my belief that screens really do have lives. It is crucial that we acknowledge this and approach screens more judiciously. Fearmongering about OpenAI and data literacies, although valid, does not necessarily solve the problem. Putting morality and ethics onto data, algorithms, and screens will not solve the problem of plagiarism, post-truth, fake news, and big tech encroachment, but critical vigilance and critical wonder that start young might. Giving respect to matter, or, more pointedly, to screens, renders them live, worthy, and powerful opponents.

People in this book describe the smallness of their digital lives when screens spark a set of actions that bring joy, that resonate, that inspire thinking, or purely entertain them. Woodward (Reference Woodward2020: 25), in her writings on material methods, says ‘A material-oriented ontology is one which does not prioritize people or “the social” or “culture”, but instead sees social relations as being simultaneously social and material and things as playing an active role in the materialisation of personhood and culture.’ She explains that ‘As people and things interact, they can change each other – a process which opens up new affordances’ (Woodward, Reference Woodward2020: 25). Decentring the human is certainly a part of my goal here, but more as way of making our relationship with screens relational, playful, discerning and disruptive about play, friendlier, and decidedly more critical.

1.11 People and Their Screens

In the end, people and their intimate dance with screens are the heart of this book. The people at different ages and stages share their distinct perspectives on screen lives. This is important to flag because transgenerational research on digital literacies is largely missing in the field of literacy studies. The research upon which this book is based took a hyperlocal ethnographic approach, zooming in on the lives of seventeen people living on one street in one city in one country. Although this is a small, specific demographic, the people in this book represent a diversity of everyday lives, experiences, and perspectives (‘ages and stages’). Below, I give you a sense of the sheer variety of these people and their intimate views.

Tabitha is in her mid to late sixties and she is the only one who owns an entire house. She rents out two floors of her house to students. She worked for many years with refugee communities and shared the most about social media for the good. She has since moved away to be closer to her family.

Amari, from Ghana, is in his thirties and works on the crescent. He is the only participant who does not live on the crescent but he rents a flat in close proximity to it. Amari felt the most conflicted about his screen life. He had a difficult time with compromised mental health during Covid-19 as a postgraduate student who received very little support from his university.

Tristan owns a flat on the crescent with his wife and they are in their eighties. They have a large family and both Tristan and his wife are not screen-reliant, although he has a programming background. Tristan shared his thoughts on digital curation, which helped his fact-finding about topics that he is passionate about, like trains.

Collette is an American in her twenties and she rents a flat on the crescent with her partner. She is savvy with her screen life and provided rich insights about workarounds with technologies and leveraging AI at home.

Peter is in his sixties and owns a flat on the crescent with his wife. Peter had fascinating insights about the affective dimensions of screens gained through his experience of moving online as a part of his legal work. I have a soft spot for Peter because he was the very first participant to email me after receiving my letter, and for this I will always be grateful.

Yvonna is in her early thirties and she lives in a flat on the crescent with her partner. Yvonna said she was born into a screen life and admitted that it was a deeply ingrained part of the fabric of her life. She was candid about deliberately creating screen-free time within her days, but also talked about the huge benefits of technologies for staying connected with her family back home.

Bonnie is in her seventies, retired, and owns a flat on the crescent with her husband, Ned, whom we also interviewed. Bonnie and Ned shared the multifaceted and relational benefits of her screen life. It is worth noting that although I count both Bonnie and Ned in the seventeen, they constitute only one interview.

Margaret is in her late sixties to early seventies and very well known on the crescent, having lived there for most of her life. She owns two flats on the crescent and rents out one to students. She was delightful and edgy and shared her views of the ways that screens control and encroach on our lives and ways to disrupt them.

Steven is in his forties and had a long career in the military and a shorter one in the NHS. He and his partner own a flat on the crescent and they create clear divisions between their work screen lives and their personal (screen-free) time. Steve is an accomplished coder and does complex coding and programming that sends him down wormholes, but he recognises them and escapes them easily.

Sheila is in her seventies and has owned a flat on the crescent for well over a decade. Like Margaret, Sheila is an extrovert and brings people together. She is in the crescent choir, regularly meets with the book club, and can be seen chatting with people in the promenade. She had the most to say about the ways that social media connects and, in some ways, protects people.

Anne is in her sixties and lives part of the time in a flat on the crescent that she owns with her partner. Anne has a tech background, and intellectualizes her relationship with screens. She admitted to enjoying her screen life, but, like others, also pushing against too great a reliance on screens. She had a profound fluency of thought about the digital-material aspects of life.

Jasmin is in her late twenties and trained as a lawyer, but she has decided not to pursue law for the moment. She has lived on the crescent for a few years and works very close to her flat. She shared with me the ways that screens gave her comfort and eased her anxiety during lockdowns.

Esther is in her seventies and owns a flat with her partner. Like Sheila and Margaret, she is known on the crescent and helps neighbours a great deal. Esther had a long career in social policy and she spent some time talking about her curatorial practices and passion for information.

Detra is in her mid-sixties and has lived on the crescent for many years. She owns a two-floor flat and, like Esther, Sheila, and Tabitha, she looks out for people on the crescent. She had the most to say about staying close through social media and about how screens can be a caring space.

Bianca is in her late sixties and is retired. She has lived all around the United Kingdom but eventually settled on the crescent with her boyfriend and has been there for twenty years. She is in the crescent choir and helps neighbours. Like Tabitha and Sheila, she is also active on local, place-based social media and is a familiar face on the crescent.

Ethan is twenty-five and recently graduated with an undergraduate degree in educational studies. He rented a shared flat on the crescent, though he has since moved away. He is as comfortable out in the world skateboarding as he is scrolling through Instagram. He gave me a strong sense of how algorithmically connected he is.

Crescent voices are eclectic, colourful, and vivid to me. They are sustaining presences and relational anchors in the book. Their willingness to share the secrets behind their screen lives has allowed me to write this book on what I see as postdigital literacy. To say that I am grateful to them is an understatement.

I approached writing this book differently than I have other books. Given that I ask crescent participants about the secrets of their screen lives, I feel that adding in my own occasional observations and using the first person folds me and my screen life into the narrative. Sometimes my voice appears in footnotes and sometimes in the main body of the text. The theoretical underpinnings of the book come from my readings of interdisciplinary writers and thinkers. I have been hugely influenced by my supervisor Brian Street in my approach to ethnography, and by my friend and mentor Gunther Kress. They have both passed away, but I still very much feel their mark on my career, all the time.

It is important to say that I am white and from a middle-class background, which makes me privileged. I am Canadian and I grew up in Canada, but I have moved for work: to the United States, then back to Canada, and now in the United Kingdom, where I started my journey doing a PhD. Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard (Reference Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard2022) write about whiteness and the material conditions and knowledge politics that white privilege relays and how it shapes us. My whiteness inflects the process of constructing this book’s narrative and I need to acknowledge and emphasize the role of my privilege and whiteness in this research. Samuel is also white and comes from a large, British, middle-class family, and he studies English literature. Tongtong is Chinese and lives with Callum, who is white and British. They live in the north of England like me. Another key piece of the book’s story is more pragmatic in nature, and that is the fact that my technical understanding of deep learning in data, algorithms, and immersive virtual environments is rudimentary. I am not apologizing for this; rather, I am stating it up-front to dispel any beliefs that I am an expert in digital cultures. I am a storyteller, pure and simple, and the book is a grab-bag of stories, theories, observations, and feelings. A modern-day canvas for telling stories about lives is often found on/at/with/against a screen.

1.12 The Book’s Structure

Throughout this book is woven a history in multimodality and, necessarily, digital commitments. My generation had a print-based childhood filled with books and paper, no screens – except for TV screens, and I was passionate about TV as a child, I adored it and still do. With this background and my background as a scholar comes an appreciation for the radically different age that we currently live in. It is an age of machines and automation, of algorithms and participatory structures, and, yes, of screens that sometimes give us comfort and sometimes inspire hate.

Each chapter starts with an epigraph from one of my favourite musicians, but these are not arbitrary flights of fancy. These lyrics connect with chapter content. The first paragraph of every chapter names an app that matches the chapter’s theme and focus. I am aware of the limitations of this book. It is modest and it is brief, grounded on an ethnographic study of seventeen people’s screen lives. To fill out the stories, I pepper in details from my own screen life, and throughout the footnotes and at chapter endings, Samuel’s distinct writerly voice gives rich postdigital substance to my speculations. This book is not exhaustive; it omits vast areas of digital education and digitality more generally. The book does, however, shine a light on some people’s observations about screen lives and what these stories can tell us about living, knowing, and communicating in modern times.