Refrains of Friendship in Young Children's Postdigital Play

Abstract

Today, digital media technologies are ubiquitous and mundane, making the relationship between digital and analog messy and porous. This postdigital condition prompts new analyses of how young children's local encounters with digital media technologies unfold, and how their relationships with digital media technologies carry on after they leave their devices. While sociomaterial approaches to literacy are apt to study how such messy literacies are enacted through singular events, they struggle to account for consistencies that emerge across events. Plugging into the concept of the refrain, we explore how felt consistencies were produced and scored two boys’ friendship through and across events as they watched YouTube, played Minecraft, and played with construction playthings. We find that felt refrains of “dwelling in novelty” were enacted, referring to the set-up of conditions where materialities acted together to produce affectively intense moments of surprise. As moments accumulated, deeply felt friendships were produced over time.