Innovations and Challenges in Digital Literacies : Literacies of Repair

Abstract

Innovations and Challenges in Digital Literacies questions whether the current theoretical frameworks and pedagogical practices around digital literacies are sufficient to confront the technological, social, and political crises around digital media that we are experiencing today. Drawing on extensive research in digital literacies, discourse analysis, and sociotechnical systems, Jones reimagines digital literacies not simply as skills for making meaning and navigating information but as a more holistic project of figuring out how to ‘fix’ what is ‘broken’ about the internet and our broader societies. The book focuses on seven key ‘sites of repair’—action, attention, affect, affinity, visibility, truth, and humanity—each site offering insights into how agency, emotions, relationships, knowledge, and ‘intelligence’ emerge through our entanglements with digital technologies. The text aims to provoke debate about how we define digital literacies in an age of political polarisation and rapid technological change. It provides powerful tools for teaching, learning, and living more ethically with digital media. With this book, Jones invites readers to see themselves not just as users of digital technology, but as fixers of broken systems—and caretakers of our increasingly fragile world. This approach provides a framework for educators, students, and researchers to collaboratively develop practical strategies to challenge the logics of technological and social systems, cultivating new literacies for an age of online misinformation, algorithmic governance, and generative AI. Open Access for this book was funded by the University of Reading, UK. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.