This chapter begins with a reflection of the Find My iPhone app, employing it as an example of how physical and digital place can exist simultaneously and in interconnected ways. Afterwards, it turns to explaining the notion of physical-digital place as parallel universes, subsequently unravelling this idea through strands taken from across crescent voice interviews. The emphasis of this chapter is on place, or more specifically the intermingling of physical and digital places, whereby the commitments, practices, and imaginaries of screens can shape one’s understandings of place and allow one to form a consciousness that is a kind of home. By employing notions of the ‘digital home’, social imaginaries, digital twins, and a postdigital concept of community, this chapter unsettles the binary between digital and physical spaces, employing Dezuanni’s definition of community to help get at the ways that online spaces feel like home. It explores these ideas primarily through crescent voices and their experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, an event which lent more prominence to practices such as digital twins.

Chapter 4 delves deeper into screen life, adopting an even more human-centred focus, in order to uncover the affective aspect of screen lives. Maintaining an embodied approach, this chapter explores how affective experiences with screens are intentionally elicited through how media is designed, how affect on screens might differ from affect outside screens, and how digital affect can inform practices, and practices induce affect. The chapter begins by defining affect, then digital affect more specifically, before turning to interviewees for their perspectives on how they feel and sense on screens, touching on topics such as micro digital affect, algorithms, and the pandemic. Crescent voices in this chapter help illustrate how digital affect is vital to understanding digital literacy practices and screen lives, especially the double-edged aspects of our affective relationships to screens.

This chapter, which opens by employing Forest as an example of an app which aims to help people avoid procrastinating on screens, is concerned with screen time. In particular, it discusses postdigital temporal rhythms, or the ways in which people experience time on, at, with, and against screens. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s theory of time, Chapter 6 situates durational time within a new, postdigital context, where free-flowing subjective time on screens is mediated by what Bergson terms qualitative multiplicity. These ideas are discussed against a backdrop of reflections from crescent voices, including data processed by ATLAS.ti, which tabulates what interviewees had to say about time and memory on screens. The chapter observes a trend in interviewee responses that experiences of time on screens were very often described as being strongly intuitive. Crescent voices frequently lost track of time in habitual movements on screens, a slip which interviewees found could give comfort by offering a break from clock time. Expanding on this, the chapter elaborates how screens disrupt notions of time as a predictable, measurable entity.

Moving on to AI and algorithms, the penultimate chapter of the book focuses on the importance of vigilance and criticality when engaging with screens. The influence of AI and algorithms on day-to-day interactions, their inherent potential to steal content, and their tendencies to stir up racism and intolerance all mean that it is becoming increasingly vital for researchers, policymakers, and educators to understand these technologies. This chapter argues that being informed and armed with meta-awareness about AI and algorithmic processes is now key to critical digital literacy. In arguing towards this conclusion, it starts by presenting scholarly perspectives and research on AI and literacy, before turning to Ruha Benjamin and Safiya Umoja Noble’s research into racism in AI and algorithms, including Benjamin’s concept of the ‘New Jim Code’. Crescent voices are invoked to contextualize these ideas in real world experiences with algorithmic culture, where encounters with blackboxed practices and struggles to articulate experiences of algorithmic patterns serve to demonstrate further the importance of finding new constructs for critical literacy that encompass algorithmic logic.

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.