Bringing Materiality into Thinking about Digital Literacy

Abstract

This chapter makes a critical intervention in studies and practices of digital literacy. Drawing upon the insight that artifacts do have politics (Winner 1980) and that humans and objects continuously co-constitute and shape one another’s agential capacities (Orlikowski 2007), I argue that to become digitally literate also implies an awareness of digital technologies’ material dimension, i.e. their technological affordances, economic embedding, and societal, environmental as well as embodied effects and repercussions. After a brief walk-through of key advances in thinking about literacy, the chapter homes inn on the notion of critical digital literacies to conceptually back the further inquiry.