Introduction

This article is an exploratory work that offers conceptual tools for studying and understanding postdigital literacies within everyday digitized life and pedagogy. The conceptualization is informed by sociomaterial approaches to communication and practice, relational epistemology, and ecological approaches to literacy. Bringing these perspectives together and proposing key related conceptual tools is the main contribution of this work. We do so by highlighting what we see as salient elements of postdigital literacy events as an environmental experience and participation in communication, distinctly marked by digital materiality (Campbell et al. 2021). The article also responds to the scarcity of practical examples of how postdigital literacy manifests across everyday and pedagogical events.

In the mid-1990s, scholars started widely reconsidering the concept of literacy as informed by the emergence of new types of media. This resulted in various labels marking new approaches to literacy, such as new and critical media literacy; multiliteracies; multimodal literacies; digital literacy; eco-, environmental, and sustainability literacies; and the latest approach of AI literacies (e.g. Cope and Kalantzis 2004; Mills 2016; Mills and Unsworth 2017; McBride et al. 2013; Campbell et al. 2021; Ng et. al. 2021). All these notions expand the classical/modern notion of literacy as ‘the ability to read and write’ (Kendeou et al. 2023) and the concept of texts consisting in alphanumeric symbols.

The advent of new literacy studies was a key foundational move from the classical concept of literacy to an understanding of literacy as a socially situated practice (e.g. Street 1984, 1988, 2013). It was further developed through the work of the New London Group (e.g. Kress and Leeuwen 2001; Kress 2010), followed by their influential studies on multimodality and related endeavours (e.g. Jewitt 2005; Jewitt 2009). Multimodality is simply defined as ‘the ability to communicate using two or more modes of meaning-making’ (Mills 2016). Already in 2000, Kress (2000) argued that it was ‘no longer possible to understand language and its uses without understanding the effect of all modes of communication that are copresent in any text’ (Kress 2000; 337). However, the view that Kress and many multimodality scholars have expressed still refers to ‘text’ as a key unit of literacy engagement, preserving a general sense of information and literacy as chiefly, or at least primarily linguistic (see Campbell and Olteanu 2024; Lacković and Olteanu 2024: 211–222).

It is fair to say that literacy is, to a large extent, about linguistic communication and verbal texts, and it is not our aim to challenge or ‘overthrow’ this and any related work. Our formulation of three key constructs (features or elements) of postdigital literacies is, inspired by an ecological, relational, and sociomaterial conceptualization of literacy studies.

An Ecological, Relational, and Sociomaterial Turn in Literacy Studies

Ecologies

Ongoing attempts to redefine literacy and education align with efforts to keep education up to speed with the rapid and widespread reconfigurations of learning and communication brought on by mass digitization. The term postdigital literacies has been recently coined at the intersection of the dynamic and fast-evolving context of postdigital research and literacy studies (Jandrić 2019; Bhatt 2023a, b; Campbell and Olteanu, 2024; Jandrić 2019; Apperley et al. 2016). A postdigital approach to literacy studies pursued in this work theoretically aligns with ecological approaches to literacy studies (Street 1984; Gee 2000; Barton and Hamilton 2000, 2012; Bhatt 2023a, b), which focus on the medially hybridized and contextual aspects of meaning-making, often in terms of complex media-technology entanglements/assemblages. Within this emerging literacy landscape, Bhatt (2023a, b) develops the notion of postdigital literacy ecologies to consider new types of media engagements, while Campbell and Olteanu (2024) extend multimodality studies in relation to postdigital literacies, proposing an integration of multimodality with biosemiotics, through inter-defining concepts, such as modal affordances, semiotic resources, and environmental modeling. These studies (Bath 2023a, b; Campbell and Olteanu 2024) highlight the processes of meaning-making in relation to (tangible, sensed) environmental properties, digital media, and embodied minds.

This direction stems primarily from the influential work of Barton (1994), converging with the rising popularity of media ecology theory (Fuller 2005), which brought to attention the tricky materiality of media as both informational and physical entities that are capable to ‘produce patterns, dangers, and potentials’ (Fuller 2005: 2). Bhatt (2023b) recently observed that one of the most significant aspects of ecological approaches is understanding ‘the embeddedness of literacy in social life, thought, history, language, materiality, and learning’, rather than the classical approach of isolating literacy texts, events and practices for analysis (cf. Campbell and Olteanu 2024). This is why, in this article, we build on the notion of materiality and environment through a ‘strong’ sense of ecological literacy that we developed previously (see Campbell et al. (2021). Such a strong sense of ecological literacy is focused on capacities to critically reflect, act, and respond (response-ability), based on the environmental situatedness of multimodal communication. It goes beyond a ‘weak’ sense of literacy (Stables and Bishop 2001), narrowly focused on the attainment and transmission of mainly verbal facts and skills (see Campbell and Olteanu, 2024).

Relationality

Postdigital literacy ecologies are relational across social, technological, and environmental dimensions (see Lacković and Olteanu 2024). Such relational framing echoes a relational epistemology that observes knowledge and learning evolution in relation to other humans, environmental entities, and technology (Gourlay 2023; Lacković and Olteanu 2024). Therefore, an important role of postdigital literacy pedagogies is to support students in developing their ‘relational awareness’ (Lacković and Olteanu 2024): an awareness of the entanglements and interconnectedness of knowledge resources, concepts, technology, the living environment and all matter. Such recognition of more-than-human relationality is an essential part of the so-called ‘entangled pedagogies’ (Fawns 2022; Dare 2020)—or, in our words, postdigital pedagogic practices (PPPs)—as well as other recently suggested forms of pedagogies, the pedagogy of mattering (Gravett et al. 2021) and mattering pedagogy (Juelskjær 2021). As Fawns explains (2022), entangled pedagogy is inherently ‘collective’ and ‘relational’, as agencies are constantly being renegotiated between teachers, students, and other (often more-than-human) things, participants and stakeholders. Its outcomes are ‘contingent on complex relations … whilst embracing uncertainty, imperfection, openness and honesty, and developing pedagogical knowledge that is collective, responsive and ethical’ (Fawns 2022, 711; cf. Campbell 2018).

We should note that postdigital relationship and relationality in actu—how postdigital entanglements manifest and how different agents and media come to relate to each other—is not necessarily or inherently positive or good. Indeed, an important aspect of the study of postdigital literacies lies in generating new perspectives and heuristics to discuss deleterious aspects of these entanglements. An ideal of relationality is a cultivation of fulfilling, enriching, and empowering relationships for all agents involved (Lacković and Olteanu 2024). However, relations are fraught with tensions, power struggles, and inequities, across their sociomaterial existence.

Sociomateriality

Postdigital literacy ecologies and events are also sociomaterial (Bhatt and de Rock 2013; Gourlay and Oliver 2013), aligned with ecological and relational approaches to communication. As Orlikowski (2007: 1438) points out, it is necessary to replace ‘the idea of materiality as ‘pre-formed sub-stances’ with that of ‘performed relations’, in order to characterize the recursive intertwining of the social and material as these emerge in ongoing, situated practice (Pickering 1995; Latour 2005)’. Adding to this argument, Pels et al. (2002: 2) emphasize the constitutive agentic effects within the entangled networks of sociality/materiality, which means that ‘materiality is integral to organizing’, as ‘the social and the material are constitutively entangled in everyday life (in Orlikowski, 2007, p. 1437)’. Therefore, materiality is not an incidental or sporadic aspect of organizational life; it is also integral in educational environments and knowledge creation practices (e.g. Fenwick and Edwards 2016; Fenwick 2010; Lacković and Popova 2021) as well as literacy (Gourlay and Oliver 2013; Bhatt and de Rock 2013).

What these approaches to literacy (ecological, relational, sociomaterial) have in common is their close connection to the concept of the ‘postdigital’ (Jandrić et al. 2018), which focuses on understanding and exploring the blurred boundaries between virtual and non-virtual worlds, accelerated, if not enabled, by recent and constantly developing media and technologies. Accounting for digital-analogue media entanglements in life, art, education, and work is central to explaining and understanding what the term ‘postdigital’ properly means amidst tremendous and accelerated technological changes. The postdigital construct calls to problematize knowledge without strictly polarizing between digital and non-digital (or analogue) media in human experience (Gourlay 2021). Building on these new framings of literacy discussed above, we foreground three (meta) features or elements that we think summarize key characteristics of relational, sociomaterial, and ecological approaches to postdigital literacy events:

  • Entanglement

  • Digital materiality

  • Spatiotemporality

These overarching elements or features do not exclude each other (e.g. entangled learning events can be and often are digitally material and they unravel across space and time). They are not fixed, and they branch into or incorporate further concepts that help the explanation and analysis of each element, which we discuss below.

Three Features (Elements) of Postdigital Literacies

Entanglement

Entanglement, as we use the term, stands for entangled learning events. It is about how learning processes—encompassing perceptual, embodied, and emotional responses as well as social, cultural, and material contexts—bring together both ‘new’ and ‘old’ media. In contemporary communication, entanglements often include digital media, but not necessarily. Some examples of media technologies that afford complex forms of entanglement are as follows: generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), GIS satellite mapping, mobile technology screens, keyboards, paper, pen, traditional ecological knowledge (or TEK), like clam middens or Fish Weirs, musical instruments, and artefacts of all types. Fawns (2022) pairs the term entangled with pedagogy, describing an entangled pedagogy model, which suggests that we need to focus on both teachers and technology as the unit of analysis, and on both material and social aspects of (entangled) practices, because ‘a holistic view of entangled elements provides a stronger basis for taking complexity into account’.

If a pedagogical recognition and critical analysis of entanglement in communication do not occur, there is a danger of techno ‘agnotology’, an uncritical perspective in which continual technological compliance ‘facilitates a systemic production and maintenance of ignorance’ (Berry and Dieter 2015: 5). As Berry and Dieter (2015: 5) note, ‘the tendency towards automated and accelerated modes of action (characteristic of an accelerated technosphere) complicates and may undermine structures of reflection and critique’. Fostering forms of engagement that cultivate suspension and critical reflection on our entangled relations with media is especially important in education, which is one of the reasons why postdigital literacy is also important.

In terms of educational research—particularly within the umbrella field of Ed Tech—the failure to recognize postdigital entanglement and other important digital/non-digital convergences has been observed; this can be explained by the tendency to assume the use and implementation of technology as ‘a distinct area of inquiry, as for example in the field of networked learning’ (Knox 2019: 358). Attention to postdigital literacy can potentially overcome such boundedness. Nonetheless, making sense of how entanglements occur with and across computational media in particular requires additional attention to the constructs of seaminess, interfacing, interface effects, and transmedial meaning-making.

Seaminess, Interfacing, Interface Seams

Seaminess refers to salient or significant experiences and practices (modes/ways) of interfacing, characterized by the attentional, intentional, and/or unintentional focus by media creators and/or users in a hybrid medium. It also signifies a shift (move) from one media platform or type to another. Seaminess is often manifested in terms of asymmetrical and power-laden interaction between artefacts (computational or otherwise), human mind-bodies, and matter. It unfolds as the focus meanders across and between different interface components/ingredients (that are sensed and/or visible), just like the seam shows and marks where pieces of the fabric intersect, hence the word seaminess.

We develop our notion of seaminess from the scarce research on postdigital literacies (Apperley et al. 2016: 215; cf. Jewitt 2002; Cramer and Fuller 2008). Apperley et al. (2016) articulate the concept of seaminess in the context of gaming literacy and critical interface studies, building on Michael Fuller (2005 212), as ‘the moments of intersection that take shape across asymmetrical powers of bodies, devices, and objects for sensing, feeling, and doing, which are hybridized in postdigital situations’. Apperley et al. 2016: 214 explain how literacy is organized ‘less around the interface as a determined object and more around practices of interfacing that involve increasingly undetermined and diverse sets of bodies, sensations, devices and materials’ (our italics and quote selection). In our view, seaminess is about salient transmedial moments and events. For example, a digital content creator may produce a bite-size travelogue that mid-way turns into a climate change protest. This shift is an example of the interface seam, a salient moment in interfacing that punctuates user’s attention, mostly as intended by the creator. Interface seams could also be described as interface weightiness or gravity, signifying salient attentional and/or informational media content.

One can identify seaminess as paying attention to what moments and feelings stand out and significantly mark that experience. We can imagine an academic in front of their laptop, with many tabs with different media formats open (they, their laptop, and the open tabs, together form an interface (another concept would be assemblage)). Their attention shifts from one to another. They need to make an informed decision on how to integrate all these media engagements, to bring everything together coherently and cogently—whether in teaching, writing, research, or studying. This decision will be informed by what appears as significant/salient information to them—what they understand as ‘seamed’ by media authors and, importantly, what ‘seams’ they (the academic) choose and/or create themselves, in that entire transmedial experience.

Interface Effects

When media entangle, they produce some ‘interface effects’ (Galloway 2012; Apperley et al. 2016), that ‘account for postdigital encounters’ in which:

computation becomes experiential, spatial and materialised in its implementation, embedded within the environment and embodied, part of the texture of life itself but also upon and even within the body (Berry and Dieter 2015:: 3 in Apperley et al. 2016).

That materialization can be also understood as the sociomaterial impact of interfacing. Teaching postdigital literacy therefore means supporting students to understand the interface effects of postdigital practices, encounters, and events, to explore what happens as the result of interfacing and which forces underpin and drive it. It explores the ‘catalysts’ and ‘products’ of practices of interfacing. This is where the traditionally ‘old’ and ‘new’ entities shift, merge, and clash (e.g. any perceived old/new practice, technology, value, belief, and inequality). For example, one product or interface effect is when human mind, the practice of writing, and artificial intelligence entangle to co-create a ‘written’ piece, such as, for example, writing ‘with’ ChatGPT or any other AI, which changes the meaning and role of ‘author’ and ‘authorship’ as well as the final written outcome. Such a ‘written piece’ is an interface effect, a distinct interface ‘product’, but this could be a feeling or action.

Interface as Transmedial Meaning-Making

Learning and the modes of interfacing formed in learning experiences are inherently transmedial (see Campbell and Olteanu 2024). Transmediality can be described as an understanding of what media relate and how, focusing on the perception of new media affordances for meanings, action and response (Campbell 2019), stemming from cross-medial intermingling and translation. Transmediality is similar to intertextuality in literacy studies. Whereas intertextuality explains meaning-making as semiotically hybrid, while still centering on linguistic texts and how we connect previously read text to an ongoing reading experience (Kristeva 1989: 36–37), transmediality asserts that minds always connect various media and phenomena during the experience of ‘interpreting’, ‘reading’, or ‘writing’, which are decidedly more-than-linguistic. For example, a reader can read something and remember a moment, a feeling, a fragrance, a piece of music or a place, a film, an advertisement, intermingling in space and time with their experience of reading. What is learned through certain media (e.g. pen and paper or a software) cannot be detached from the respective medium. As such, intermedial translation is always, in its own right, a valuable as well as distinct learning experience. Being able to make arithmetic multiplication virtually, ‘in the mind’, with pen and paper and with an electronic calculator are different actions which corroborate to understanding multiplication not independently of, but across media.

Transmediality is intimately connected with what in multimodality studies is termed resemiotisication (Iedema 2003). Following Iedema (2003: 41), ‘resemioticisation is about how meaning-making shifts from context to context, from practice to practice, or from stage of a practice to the next’. Mapping and describing these shifting processes of transmediality through the notion of resemioticisation proved insightful for curriculum theorizing, in terms of considering both teachers and learners as designers of meaning. At a basic level, teachers engage in resemioticisation constantly (Jewitt 2008). In contemprary learning environments, such engagement is also digitally material.

Digital Materiality

Digital materiality refers to the material affordances of digital media, necessary for any notion of (post)digital literacy. It conceptually encompasses the physical/environmental, algorithmic, representational, and cultural materiality of digital media and artifacts. All digital technology is material. As Gourlay (2021: 57) notes, ‘there is no virtual learning’, because ‘all aspects of digital engagement are in fact grounded in material and embodied entanglements with devices and other artefacts’. We follow this observation and also build on Leonardi (2010), who defines three senses of digital materiality as (1) matter; (2) practical instantiation; and, (3) significance, to which we add the notion of body-technology assemblage, and how digital technologies represent matter semiotically (Campbell et al. 2021).

Digital Matter

This first sense evokes the classical notion of materiality, as technology is made from different material elements that constitute its hardware. It is common in contemporary (post-)capitalist industry and economy to mine scarce materials in places labeled as countries that are ‘developing’ or ‘in transition’ (Lackovic and Olteanu 2024: 23). We are at a point where life on Earth depends on critically considering how the exploitation of physical materiality/substances in the biosphere contributes to new extractivist and neocolonial practices (Joler 2020). Crawford and Joler (2018) provide an example of digital technology ‘life’ (of an Amazon Echo, which these days could equally be a Google or any AI ‘assistant’). To understand the life of that digital technology, Crawford and Joler (2018) develop a map-like, graphic anatomy of an AI through design-based thinking. They approach this mapping process from a philosophical and critical theory perspective, particularly as enabled by the notion of sociomaterial assemblages of actors and networks (Latour 2005). Their work emphasizes that inequalities and power relations are rooted in the trajectories of digital matter but are invisible to the user of the final project. To address this, they visually map them. Indeed, ‘(a) typical smartphone may be designed on one continent, draw raw materials from three others, get assembled on a fifth, and be shipped to a sixth for ultimate sale’ (see Ross 2020).

Embodiment as Body-Technology Assemblage

In this context, embodiment refers to how interaction with technology extends bodies, forming body-technology assemblages. As we have written previously (Campbell et al. 2021), ‘(w)e are positioned in the world with our bodies and we understand and interact with this world through our bodies’. We fundamentally engage with digital media through embodied cognition. The hardware (electronic machine) affords clicking, tapping, turning and so on. This corresponds to the first level notion of materiality as ‘tangible stuff’ from which our bodies are made and with which our bodies come into contact with. Materiality that we come into contact with is neuro-compatible (Malafouris 2008), in the sense that we think with it. To build on this, we need to remember how digital technology affordances are rehabituating movement (e.g. young children become habituated to interacting with mobile touch screens and react by default to anything that looks like a screen by tapping, swiping, or scrolling it with their fingers). With biotechnology, such as wearable devices and body augmentation, the boundaries of our bodies are increasingly blurred. Even the ‘humble’ pen, let alone the mobile phone, is a ‘technological matter’ that works together with our hand, an indispensable part of our lives.

Digital Instantiation

The second side of digital materiality, as suggested by Leonardi (2010), links with practical instantiations of theories and abstract concepts via technology: ‘when principles, beliefs, or values are made manifest in some way, they become material’. Instantiation refers to how theoretical insights, ideas, plans, models, and diagrams are realized materially, which means representationally, in practice. Examples include a VR simulation, an illustrated diagram, a video created to ‘showcase’ practice, digital photographs, and illustrations (drawings).

Digital Representation

Representational materiality of digital media is an extension of or an addition to digital instantiation (Campbell et al. 2021), which refers to analysing what a digital representation stands for, as wel as what it represents (a person, a place), for example, what digital images circulated in public media and learning contexts represent and how (Lacković 2020a, b). Postdigital literacy practices call for inclusion and analysis of their affordances, e.g. how visual and other types of representations manifest in postdigital learning, how they represent, for whom and to whom they do so, and what exactly they offer to/for learners and educators. It would be a mistake to ignore the representational effects and affordances that emerge in new instances of online or face-to-face interactions. For example, while learning, learners engage with various social and visual media, such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube videos, VR (virtual reality), or image-focused GenAI. These media provide visual representations that are central (rather than marginal) to learners’ experience of postdigital literacy practices.

Digital Significance

The third aspect described by Leonardi (2010), digital significance, is about the creative capacity of users to use digital interface affordances in distinct, new and/or diverse ways. Digital significance describes how users instantiate or actualize new technological affordances salient to their own localized practices, contexts, and purposes. It can be said that the interface seams that we explained earlier stem from this sense of digital significance.

All these sensibilities of digital materiality constitute postdigital affordances, that is, how different and changing characteristics and properties of new media and human activity come together, forming practices of interfacing. This is important to consider within the study of postdigital literacies, based on the basic acknowledgment that digital technologies are material and increasingly intertwined with human embodiment and environments. These entanglements in communication experiences are both spatial and temporal, which leads us to the third element of spatiotemporality.

Spatiotemporality

Postdigital literacy experiences transform understandings and experiences of place, time, and environments. For instance, satellite mapping technology (like GIS) radically transforms conceptions of place-connectedness and place-based relationality (from how these were conceived with, say, printed maps produced with political agendas). To emphasize the importance of place, educators may employ collaborative digital mapping tools such as GoogleMaps and FieldMaps, as well as a variety of mapping practices (e.g. see an example of countermapping pedagogy in design education by Shibboleth Shechter in Lackovic and Olteanu 2024: 287–300). In relation to temporality and speed, we further expand the abovementioned critique by Berry and Dieter (2015) on how technological acceleration may undermine the time for reflection and critique in higher education.

The need for slowness is evocative of the performativity issues with accelerated academia (Berg and Seeber 2016), which latest technologies have, arguably, sped up even more. In response to the uncritical and dromological consumption of new media, diverse ‘slow’ movements have been advocated for slow thinking (Kaheman 2017), slow food, slow fashion, and, of closest relevance, slow pictures in higher education practices, referring to the curricular time needed to critically analyze visual media in education (Lacković and Hurley 2021). Campbell (2018; cf. Sikkema et al. 2021; Campbell 2022) also proposes this slowing down of pedagogy, in the context of cultivating pedagogical openness in arts education and critical media literacy. A slow movement within postdigital literacy would indeed necessitate finding time to interact with, analyze and unpack the many meanings that have recently exploded through technologies and new visual media in relation to the curriculum (Lacković and Hurley 2021).

Spatiotemporal Flow and Presence

When we focus on how time intersects with space within postdigital literacy practices, we are also talking about spatiotemporal flow and presence across online/offline environments and platforms. Spatiotemporal flow is simply the flow of time that underpins different literacy practices (including reading or writing) across media and space. A postdigital literacy analysis would explore and define the different types and experiences of spatiotemporal flows in postdigital communication. For example, this could mean that communicative practices and learning engagement may be unravelling for learners (in private space and time), but may be invisible to teachers or universities. This reflection takes inspiration from Gourlay’s (2023) conceptualization of fugitive practices and the ephemerality of university learning or writing, which refers to the practices that are not recorded but, while fleeting, form an important part of learners’ (and educators’) experiences. Noticing and appreciating the ephemerality of learning that is not digitally captured in its spatiotemporal flow is part of postdigital conceptualisations and further enhances an understanding of postdigital communication.

Another aspect of spatiotemporality is presence in space and time, which includes not only one’s own presence, but also absence and co-presence in postdigital experiences, online and offline spaces. If we consider the postdigital also as ‘more-than-digital’ (Gourlay 2023), then we need to acknowledge experiences that do not rely upon or include active use of digital media, such as solitary thinking, reading a book, writing down notes and thinking in private. Importantly, in relation to sharing space and place, Gourlay (2023) refers to the concept of co-presence, the phenomenon of meeting peers face-to-face for deep conversations or being together in a physical space such as university classrooms or halls for a lecture or seminar, as a distinct as well as valuable university experience. A challenge then for online education is how to create a sense of digital co-presence within online learning environments. These and other aspects of postdigital literacy events are reflected on in our examples below.

Exemplifying Postdigital Literacy Events and Experiences

In the remainder of the article, we exemplify how the various aspects of postdigital literacies we discussed above ‘manifest’ in everyday life and pedagogic practices, responding to the general dearth of examples in the literature. We do so by sharing anecdotes from our experiences—employing the process of anecdolization as a kind of inventive, (post)qualitative methodology. The anecdote may not seem ‘at first glance to belong to an academic repertoire of methods at all’ (Lury and Wakeford 2012: 3), yet when understood as a process and a verb, anecdotalisation can become a powerful method of qualitative inquiry into intersecting, shared experiences. The operationalisation of the anecdote helps authors to identify questions and tensions manifest in complex phenomena, that are impervious to a single analytic vantage point or even a single research-positionality:

... an anecdote enables research to follow forked directions, to trace processes that are in disequilibrium or uncertain, to acknowledge and refract complex combinations of human and non-human agencies, supporting an investigation of what matters and how in ways that are open, without assuming a single fixed relation between epistemology and ontology. (Lury and Wakeford 2012: 4)Footnote 1

Our anecdotes are personal examples of how postdigital literacy is enacted. We exemplify, for example, transmediality, digital matter and digital representation challenges, interface effects, body-technology entanglement, seaminess, and spatiotemporality of postdigital pedagogic practices. Each person gives their own ‘stamp’ to their anecdote, in the first-person singular. Alin’s anecdote is a junior academic’s chronological narrative of transmediality and mobility and adaptability to various interfaces ‘on the go’; Cary’s is an account of a postdigital pedagogic practice that invites student reflexivity through analogue–digital interfacing experiences, placing mapping and movement at the centre of learners’ experiences; Nataša writes a reflective piece on her experience as digital educator, illustrating how online education is postdigital, and highlighting digital materiality through digital matter and value-laden digital representation, interface glitches and effects.

Alin: Understanding the Postdigital Life of Academic Nomadism

Spatiotemporal Shifts and Transmediality of City Life

Moving across spaces and borders is a transmedial process, as media affordances change with position and context. Being aware of this and acting upon it in an informed manner is an important aspect of postdigital literacies. I reflect on this by comparing my experiences of living in three (among many) very different cities: London, Kaunas, and Aachen. In London, I quickly learned that to travel from home to work, or to find a pub, using and interpreting a lot of digital data (e.g. live updates on public transportation, strikes, public works, weather warnings, and terrorist attacks) is an essential skill. My thinking became more plurally mediated, or transmedial, as ‘Clapham Junction’ meant at the same time the experience of being physically present in that station and engaging with visual information in an app. Commuting through Clapham Junction, I was in a spatiotemporal transmedial experience, where my attention across various media shifted, e.g. from the digital app to the platform, buses, and trains, often drawn to the Cornish pasty shop.

When I moved to Kaunas, I experienced a medial shift from an indisputably global city of London to one approximately 30 times smaller. Income, but also living expenses are smaller in Kaunas than in London. As I did not consider nuances of transmedial communication and how digital materiality occurs and entangles in these different cities, I made two mistakes that could be observed as separate but, actually, display the same lack of (post)digital literacy in understanding my postdigital life. They also show specific interface effects. First, I rented an apartment on the outskirts of Kaunas, having learnt in London that I do not afford city centre lodging. In Kaunas, I actually afforded renting a city centre apartment. Second, as in London I used to download books and music during long commutes, in Kaunas I acquired a very expensive phone contract, with as much data allowance as possible. While in London, I had a lot of writing done during 2-h commutes on urban trains. In Kaunas, however, the phone contract was too expensive for my income and lifestyle. Living on the outskirts of this small city, while a valuable experience, was not the best that Kaunas had to offer a postdigital academic nomad such as myself, eager for cultural events and diversity. It took a few weeks to learn that an academic salary in Kaunas allows for living in the city centre, right next to my office at the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and that a high volume data allowance is unnecessary. An important (ethnographic, technological, and economic) consideration is that walking through the centre of Kaunas never leaves one out of the Wi-Fi coverage of local coffee shops. I was, indeed, ignorant about Kaunas’ transmedial landscape. Trying to replicate, instead of transmediate, my London life in Kaunas displayed a lack of postdigital literacy.

Presence or Absence of Media: Digital Signatures, Wi-Fi Contingent Labour

When in 2020 I relocated to RWTH Aachen University, Germany, while having rich experiences of relocating and of global, (post)digital living, I found myself, again, unprepared for this transmedial shift. After living in highly-digitized Estonia, I was shocked to have to travel to Aachen at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic for no other reason than having to sign, by hand, with ink on paper and in the physical, non-digital presence of another human, a contract. In Estonia, the only way to sign legally is through digital signature. In Germany, at least by March 2020, there was no legal notion of a digital signature. The signature only counted as legally valid if an HR employee of the university witnessed my ‘physical’ signing the contract.

Surprises followed, such as it being impossible to work while commuting on trains in Germany, because trains are usually too full to find a seat and the Wi-Fi connection. If the train even has Wi-Fi, it is too weak for sending an email with an attachment. Hence, I underwent new learning experiences, in the form of transmedial adaptation. Living in Germany enriched my life, not only because of what Germany has to offer, but also because of what Germany lacks. Therefore, postdigital literacies comprise, also, knowledge of and capacities to adapt to non-digitized environments. These examples showcase adapting to everyday living and working in new media affordances as managing and adapting to different transmedial entanglements.

Cary: Engaging with Postdigtial Literacy Via Campus Walks and Digital Maps

From Campus to Forest

I focus here on the postdigital literacy aspects of a particular pedagogical practice that my students and I have engaged in regularly, every semester since 2017: Land-based Campus and Forest Walks, around SFU’s Burnaby Mountain campus, in the Greater Vancouver area.Footnote 2 This anecdote showcases some of the ways in which students transmediate from one form of media-engagement to another, across and between devices and interfaces, often following an emergent path of inquiry and, importantly, making no strong distinctions between digital/analog, online/offline experiences. The spatiotemporal aspect of this pedagogy continues and shifts from physical (walks) to digital (maps). This happens as students use mapping software to inquire into and question some routine and established ways of relating to and representing places. The mapping highlights how practices of interfacing reconfigure relationships to place, time, and space (pointing at spatio-temporal positionality as central to postdigital practice and therefore literacies).

In my Building on Reflective Practices course, we have a student-directed workshop, involving a hike across campus, through the forest to Burnaby Mountain Park, exploring the entanglement of ecological fieldwork and reflective practice methods. During the walk, the student group lead the class through a series of activities adapted from Maran’s (2020) Ecological Repertoire analysis, a method of qualitative fieldwork primarily aimed at documenting interspecies events in local environments, through observing events, patterns, themes, motifs, affordances that can be linked to significant eco-fields that animals make use of (resting ecofield; foraging ecofield, guarding ecofield, etc.).

Shifting Practices of Interfacing

On the walk across campus to the trailhead, I point out and speak about local artworks and history, which includes Indigenous place-names and their significance (connecting to course themes). Students simultaneously (and it seems seamlessly) engage digitally with ecological, historical, and artistic sites on their personal devices (smartphones): looking up sculptures and local artworks (e.g. Bill Reid and other sculptures by Haida artists; a small sampling of works completed by Coast Salish artists like Susan Point); identifying local plants (on a variety of apps); collecting multimodal fieldwork data through GIS tools such as the FieldMaps app (supported by our university library). I am pleased that (some) students in the class are continuing to use mapping software to inquire into and question some of our routine and established ways of relating to and representing places. Since a workshop in counter-mappingFootnote 3 earlier in the semester, a few students have become particularly interested in the critical-pedagogical possibilities of digital mapping tools to question and defamiliarize, such as using GIS tools for decolonial pedagogy or ecological counter-mapping like ‘Flip-the-map!’ and ‘Feral Atlas’.Footnote 4

Reconfiguring Place Through Digital Counter-Mapping

Once at the vista point at Burnaby Mountain park—which looks over səl̓ilw̓ət, the entire Burrard Inlet and Indian Arm—some students look up Indigenous village sites as well as sites of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (e.g. the historic 1300-year-old fish weir at Maplewoods flats or Stisma, utilizing a particular Land-acknowledgement GIS Map (called the LA Map) that I co-created with a group of pre-service teachers, as well as the Bill Reid Centre’s ÍMESH mobile app.Footnote 5 This is a specific spatiotemporal practice that can be understood as digital counter mapping, as it uses digital maps and mapping to critically analyse socio-cultural and environmental phenomena. Digital counter maps also display digital materiality in terms of how places are represented digitally, and how we can use them for reflection (Figs. 1, 2, 3, and 4).

Fig. 1
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Screenshot showcasing some of what we explored, at Burnaby Mountain Park, through the LA Map, while looking over the city and Inlet (Author: Mark Brennan)1

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Fig. 2
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Screenshots showcasing some of what we explored, at Burnaby Mountain Park, through the LA Map, while looking over the city and Inlet (Fig. 2 of 3)

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Fig. 3
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Screenshots showcasing some of what we explored, at Burnaby Mountain Park, through the LA Map, while looking over the city and Inlet (Fig. 3 of 3)

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Fig. 4
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Coast Salish Place names we looked up through the ÍMESH app (Bill Reid Centre)

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On the walk back through the forest, the student facilitation group reminds us to put our phones away, to hone our observations of the forest environment. Students index all kinds of environmental signs and inter-species events, reflecting on the central question: ‘What constitutes an interaction event?’ Once back in the classroom, students continue their inquiry and dialoguing, reflecting on what they experienced together on the walk, but now shifting back to more intimate (analog) media – chatting at tables looking through a variety of local Indigenous and place-centred books I had been leaving in our classroom. The overwhelming hybridity and seaminess of these practices and events have become much more apparent to me since starting these walks eight years ago.

Nataša: Postdigital Literacy in Online Academia

Digital Matter and Online Work

One of the consequences of having my laptop as my extension, including carrying it around on my back and writing on it for long hours as an online educator, is back pain. This can be seen as one interface effect, triggered by the particular character of my laptop’s digital matter (hardware)—its weight and my physical body’s positioning in relation to it. It propelled me to search the Internet for ‘the lightest laptop in the world’, examine my spine health, and, consequently, do therapy for back health, as I became strongly aware of how digital technology relates to my well-being and my body. Other bodily interface effects of laptop hardware are linked to knowing how to ‘touch type’, a technical literacy skill, part, and parcel of digital as well as postdigital literacy. The notable thing about it is that writing at a greater speed can be seen as an author’s advantage—the faster she writes, the more she can write. What this means for postdigital literacy is being aware of, acknowledging, and acting upon interface effects that happen when body and digital matter connect and interrelate.

Online Communication Glitches, Effects, and Remedial Strategies

Another aspect of postdigital literacy is an understanding of how learning and communication happen online. As I work with PhD and MA students online, I am aware that teacher-student contact is important for the success of online pedagogies and relationships. However, contact can be easily stifled in online supervision, due to all sorts of disruptive elements, some of which are not that easy to control, avoid, or pin down. I refer to these disruptive elements as ‘glitches’ in online communication/interface: emails get ‘lost’ in our inbox or they do not get sent due to Wi-Fi instability or shifts of attention, no clear agreement or acceptance on who drives the communication is made, teachers and/or students experience high workload, burnout, and/or take time off for various reasons, etc. Such types of glitches can freeze and even damage student–teacher relationships.

My awareness of such glitches nudged me to devise strategies to assure student–teacher contact time. One strategy involves communicating with my online supervisees via ‘quick messaging systems’, e.g. via the official university app – Teams, which I use both on my phone and my laptop. In that way, students have an option of easy and quick contact aligned with their learning needs. In addition, finding the time to write is of particular importance to online PhD students. This is why I devised another strategy, the ‘online writing time’ with individual students or student groups, to meet online via Teams or Zoom and simply be co-present in that virtual space while we write (and/or research and read) on our own. We set goals for the session in the beginning and report back what we have accomplished at the end of the session, commonly with cameras and sound switched off while we write/research. The sheer presence that we share virtually as supervisor and supervisees is motivating and supportive for everyone. It introduces a sense of mutual accountability. My doctoral students have confirmed the value of that practice, which is equally valuable for my own research. As these strategies support all ‘sides’ involved to have enriching experiences, they enact a relational philosophy and paradigm in and of higher education.

Intersectionality of Representational and Embodied Digital Materiality

Online presence and pedagogy are distinctly representational. The representational digital materiality of online communication and education (e.g. our digital profile photographs and ‘trails’) is not neutral. It carries intersectional challenges from other environments (e.g. university campus spaces, face to face encounters). I experience that the ‘reality’ of my body (which includes my socio-cultural demographic markers, such as my name, ethnicity and gender), is strongly present in digital education and my online academic presence and publications. I may be given different, and, to be precise, lower, levels of intellectual ‘significance’ and ‘authority’ as compared to other scholars, e.g. Western, male scholars, perhaps even more strongly online than in face-to-face encounters. The troublesome aspects of ‘online embodiment’ that I have observed, and heard about in general, include the adoption of the same, long-lived hierarchies and values as in materially walled spaces of universities, such as the (lesser) credibility and authority given to educators who are female, early career and/or other-than Western nationals. Power relations get translated into online media and into the experience of interfacing around how bodies and identities are linked to respect, recognition, and bias. But there are also positive aspects of online embodiments, which include the possibility of empowering (re)constructions of self. Overall, postdigital interfaces in online education and scholarship are value-laden, hence this needs to be discussed in pedagogies and with peers. In summary, representational digital materiality is embodied, identity-shaping, and framing.

The Doing of Postdigital Literacy and Being Postdigitally literate

So, what does it mean to be postdigitally literate? Simply, it refers to being aware of and acting upon the various aspects of postdigital literacies in everyday life and educational contexts. It means treating information as multimodal, digitally and socially material, fluid (shape-shifting) and subject to critical analysis and contestation. Criticality is particularly important, as critical analysis is the cornerstone of any engagement with media, in education and everyday life (Lackovic 2020a). Our anecdotes highlight different aspects of what is happening during postdigital literacy experiences and events, presenting conceptual openings which teachers and researchers can explore further.

Alin’s example suggests that postdigital social conditions urge a notion of learning as transmedially configured and environmentally situated. Educational practices and theory have always erred to dissociate what is being learned from the environmental and medial context of learning (Brown et al. 1989). Postdigital entanglements make this error clear. Relocating is a common experience in a digitally connected global economy. In London, high-data allowance is a necessity; in Kaunas, it is a luxury. Switching to a more economic phone contract and being less reliant on transportation apps did not impoverish the transmediality of Alin’s living. On the contrary, it added yet new types of data, through new medialities, albeit not in the form of modeled electronic bits. Therefore, postdigital literacy encompasses competences to medially adapt, adaptation being understood as a key form of communication and learning (Olteanu and Stables 2018). The relocations that an academic career often involves, as showcased in Alin’s anecdote, require renewing attentiveness in new medial and socio-technological situations and adapting through improvising. Similarly, in the context of education, Cary’s anecdote poses a critical question to postdigital literacy: How do different types of postdigital entanglements (and their associated practices of interfacing) affect, alter, and reconfigure our ability to improvise and move along a way of life or—for that matter, a curriculum?

Cary’s anecdote distinctly brings attention to the importance of refining attention and awareness—engaging in what Tim Ingold (2022, 2023) has called an education of attention—through exploring diverse modes of place-based engagement. Each iteration of the walk Cary takes with students as well as the media (analog and digital) that they explore, along the way, presents new possibilities and scaffoldings along a kind of walking curriculum (Judson and Datura 2023; cf. Ingold 2023). This itself highlights something about the dual meaning of the Latin term Curriculum, which refers to both the course/track/container of educational events as well as the events/happenings themselves—everything that might happen along the track/course (Egan 1978). As Ingold (see Ingold 2013; Ingold and Hallam 2021) alerted throughout his career: ‘to learn is to improvise a movement along a way of life’. Relatedly, Lamb et al. (2022) note that: ‘although there is a certain convenience, and perhaps an administrative necessity, in distinguishing between degree programmes that are delivered either ‘on campus’ or ‘online’, it is a distinction that ignores the postdigital reality of contemporary learning’.

Nataša’s anecdotal account illustrates how spatiotemporality works in online education, emphasizing different, often neglected, aspects of presence and contact, in physical and virtual place and time. It particularly points at the value of creating a sense of online co-presence, building on the insight by Gourlay (2023) about the importance of classical face-to-face encounters in education and the sense of co-presence between learners, teachers, or teachers and learners. It also reminds us of postdigital literacy as an extension of critical media literacy (see Jandrić 2019 and Lacković 2021) in the context of online education. In that regard, postdigital literacy means to analyse postdigital entanglements as places of power and representations that are formed through digital materiality and embodiment. It means to reflect on how bodies, artefacts and their sociocultural meanings are interpreted in digital spaces and how they historically produce and reproduce social orders and hierarchies (Lacković and Popova 2021). Such critical reflection evokes a notion of critical postdigital literacies.

Nataša’s anecdote perhaps confirms the importance of teacher availability, care, and support as more important than ‘teacher presence’ in online education space, as argued by Preisman (2014). It certainly questions whose presence or absence. Such questioning evokes issues of intersectionality. For example, different gender gaps and expectations still exist and have been evidenced in academia (Ashencaen Crabtree and Shiel 2019). Socioculturally and historically, women are strongly associated with duties of ‘care’ and ‘support’ (Sprague and Massoni, 2005), hence there may be associated expectations and typecasting (by students and peers of all gender). Other examples of digital representations include university teachers’ scholarly track record and online presence that is readily available online (through Google Scholar, X/formerly Twitter, Research Gate, Academia Edu, Linked In, and other digital platforms) to signify someone’s scholarly value and recognition. What we wish to emphasize is the intersectionality in representing educators in online spaces, and the need to guide students and staff to recognize and reflect on any stereotypes (e.g. concerning female, racial, ethnic or any other positionality). The point is that educators and students can co-develop an awareness of how power relations are translated and formed through digital communication and representations (signs), where different types of information stand for person or people.

Overall, postdigital literacy is potentially highly impactful and efficient for reforming education. To respond to the challenges and complexities of postdigital living, literacy research needs to expand its focus from information as verbal texts, text encoding/decoding and associated skills and competencies to a multimodal focus on transmediality and postdigital media competencies, concepts, experiences, and events. This is to be done while fully acknowledging issues of digital materiality, the fluidity and entanglement of media and modes as they reconfigure our relationship to space, time and place, on-the-go, while we commute, walk down the street or up a mountain, develop companionship with our devices and experience the lived body online.

Formal education has hardly adapted to a world where a culturally and medially creative teenager can achieve financial success through YouTube and TikTok (see Hartley 2012). Methodologically, this will require a diversity of research approaches: from ethnographic and observational approaches (e.g. our anecdote-based approach) to multimodal artifact analysis and new forms of collecting and reshaping data through digital devices and other hybridized types of analysis (such as employing GenAI and algorithms as research and teaching tools and partners, see Ho et al. 2022).

Certainly, we still (need to) engage with more classical (digital) literacies, maintain, and develop technological skills and competencies (e.g. video creation or editing, using digital documents, and apps). We still continue actively using and celebrating linguistic signs—words, grammatical structures—while acknowledging how new literacies have deeply shaken the myth that language and other ‘abstract’ symbolic systems work as isolated and non-material entities, in general, and in the context of digital communication.

Conclusion

In a world of rapidly developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and new media, as well as looming environmental disasters, new ways of thinking about contemporary communication and literacy are needed. This article is an educational response to these challenges, offering tools to cultivate awareness of postdigital literacy in relation to this fast-evolving media landscape.

We identified three postdigital literacy features (entanglement, digital materiality, and spatiotemporality), as informed by an ecological, sociomaterial, and relational understanding of communication and literacy. Each of these features represents what we see as salient attributes of contemporary media communication and education. Entanglement signifies how media relate to each other and how they interact, shift, and seamlessly fuse to inform and/or entertain, including the occurrence of interface seams (salient transmedial moments) and effects. Digital materiality is important as it recognizes that digital media carry material properties—sensed (e.g. tactile, aural, visual), embodied, and computational. These should be analysed critically to understand better digital representations and what they stand for, as well as how they relate to issues of power and emancipatory struggles. Spatiotemporality points at the need to explore the spatial and temporal character of communication and pedagogic practices that form relationships with new media.

In general, we (citizens and education participants) need to understand how postdigital events and interface effects reshape/transform our daily living, learning, and meaning-making. Arguably, this will require opening up educational research to transdisciplinary concerns and inquiries. Future work can develop features of postdigital literacy in relation to equity, intersectionality and justice. In a practical sense, this study exemplifies how postdigital literacy manifests in everyday encounters and specific teaching–learning practices. Our three anecdotes illustrate how we personally and professionally encounter and understand postdigital entanglements across diverse international settings. Overall, the article provides conceptual tools for the established and constantly growing global body of scholars and educators, interested in exploring digital media, postdigital education, and literacies.

EndNote

1See https://thegrouplegroupe.org/lmland-acknowledgment-map. Accessed 26 August 2024.