Understanding digital technology in daily life: why we should think holistically in terms of a
digital environment instead of discrete devices and apps. Increasingly we live through our
personal screens we work play socialize and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything
during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the digitization of
everyday life made possible by innovations in media information and communication technology.
In The Digital Environment Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein offer a new way to
understand the role of the digital in our daily lives calling on us to turn our attention from
our discrete devices and apps to the array of artifacts and practices that make up the digital
environment that envelops every aspect of our social experience. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein
explore a series of issues raised by the digital takeover of everyday life drawing on
interviews with a variety of experts. They show how existing inequities of gender race
ethnicity education and class are baked into the design and deployment of technology and
describe emancipatory practices that counter this--including the use of Twitter as a platform
for activism through such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. They discuss the
digitization of parenting schooling and dating--noting among other things that today we can
both begin and end relationships online. They describe how digital media shape our consumption
of sports entertainment and news and consider the dynamics of political campaigns
disinformation and social activism. Finally they report on developments in three areas that
will be key to our digital future: data science virtual reality and space exploration.
