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7 - People at Screens

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2025

Jennifer Rowsell
With contributions by
Samuel Sandor
Jennifer Rowsell
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Samuel Sandor
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
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Summary

After a discussion of X (Twitter) and the kinds of feelings, sentiments, and practices that it engenders in users, Chapter 7 explores what people do on screens: the social practices, thinking, and being that occur in postdigitality. Pursuing the mission of the book to seek the human in the machine, this chapter attends to how crescent voices act at screens, discovering the many learned and habituated digital literacy practices which allow screen users to perform their identities multimodally in multitudinous and diverse ways. Based on interviewee accounts, this chapter offers a model of postdigital practices which employs the concepts of fishbowls, antholes, rabbitholes, and wormholes, while also drawing on Charles Taylor’s social imaginaries.

Keywords

fishbowlsantholesrabbitholeswormholessocial imaginariespracticesdigital literacysocial media
Type
Chapter
Information
The Comfort of Screens
Literacy in Postdigital Times
 , pp. 122 - 141
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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