Abstract
A great deal of attention is paid to how people interact with digital technologies and the impact of the digital on people. While there is much interest in the role of digital technology in our lives, we engage in this interest in the digital by recalling that ‘interest’ is, as the anthropologist Michael D. Jackson suggests, made up of inter and est, the latter meaning ‘to be’. In the context of this edited volume, we, in this chapter, foreground inter-being between people, considering the digital tools and platforms that both facilitate and modulate these interactions and relationships. With the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as a backdrop, and with mixtures of apprehension and appreciation, the authors reflect of different aspects of digitally mediated inter-being: the challenges of fostering incidental-though-important student communion in university classes; how counsellors can positively engage with clients digitally; the impact and dynamics of email; concern over the algorithms that modulate our interactions on social media; and the role social media played for many people during the pandemic-induced lockdowns.
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Lee, J.C.H., Branford, A., Karakas, G., Kayes, L., Quek, K. (2023). Digital Inter-est: On Being Together in a Global Digital World. In: Kath, E., Lee, J.C.H., Warren, A. (eds) The Digital Global Condition. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9980-2_10
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