Navigating Digital Life: Insights from Communication Design Quarterly

Digital Life encompasses the myriad ways in which our personal interactions, communications, work, education, and entertainment are transformed by digital devices and platforms, shaping our social and cultural landscapes and redefining modern living in an interconnected world. Yet despite, or maybe because of, living in a digital age mediated by digital devices and platforms, the profound impact of our digital existence is difficult to fully comprehend.

In their introduction to the special edition of Communication Design Quarterly titled Toward Digital Life: Embracing, Complicating, and Reconceptualizing Digital Literacy in Communication Design, Danielle Mollie Stambler (James Madison University), Saveena (Chakrika) Veeramoothoo (University of Houston), and Katlynne Davis (University of St. Thomas) propose moving toward a digital life framework for fostering the interconnected literacies, skills, and competencies essential for technical communicators and individuals in 21st-century society. Drawing on their work for the Building Digital Literacy (BDL) research cluster at the Digital Life Institute, the editors of this special issue argue we face a digital literacy imperative, with emerging technologies compromising autonomy, privacy, and identity. In partnership with Decimal Lab, at Ontario Tech University that houses the Fabric of Digital Life repository, the BDL research cluster examines the impact of emerging technologies on communication, social interaction, and human thought.

In Toward Digital Life: Embracing, Complicating, and Reconceptualizing Digital Literacy in Communication Design, Stambler et al. (2024) highlight the increasing impact of wearable technologies, which enhance our lives through surveillance and data analytics, and simultaneously raise concerns about privacy, surveillance, and autonomy. In their view, as digital complexities grow, there is a need to redefine digital literacy. To this end, digital literacy involves a developmental process that integrates the technological, rhetorical, and social dimensions of digital experience. They argue this literacy is vital for understanding and engaging with the elaborate, interconnected aspects of digital life, enabling full and active participation. To underscore the pervasiveness of digital influences, Stambler et al. (2024) claim literacy must not be portrayed as a context-neutral skill. This approach is essential, they say, in order to avoid marginalizing other forms of knowledge and ways of understanding. In essence, Stambler et al. (2024) want to “theorize the turn they see on the horizon.” As they state: “we feel on the cusp of a turn, when the size, scope, and complexity of issues around the digital make it necessary to revisit, embrace, complicate, and/or reconceptualize digital literacy.”

To foster a broader conversation, Volume 12, Issue 2 of Communication Design Quarterly aims to connect these discussions with broader fields such as Technical and Professional Communication, User Experience, Communication Design, and interdisciplinary scholarship. With this goal in mind, Stambler et al. (2024) called for proposals that embrace, complicate, extend, challenge, and reconceptualize digital literacy and digital life. The result is eight carefully curated articles that illustrate the intricate and multifaceted nature of our digital lives, highlighting their simultaneous intangibility and embodiment, while proposing productive approaches to digital life in scholarship, pedagogy, and practice. In combination, these articles prompt reflection on the paradoxes and conflicts inherent in digital life, as well as the evolving literacies and methodologies associated with it.

What is groundbreaking about this issue, however, is the guiding model that emerges from the editors’ collaborative work within the BDL cluster at Digital Life Institute. In their introduction, Stambler et al. (2024) propose three pillars that offer a structured approach to digital literacy in communication design, aiding in demystifying and contextualizing the labyrinthine, fluid nature of digital existence. The first pillar asserts digital life is unavoidable and demands complex, layered literacies, skills, and competencies to fully engage in personal, social, and professional realms. The second draws attention to inequity and oppression as they appear in both digital and nondigital spaces, necessitating a commitment to socially-just digital life pedagogy and praxis. The third pillar centres on people’s lived experiences, emphasizing how intersectional identities and positionalities shape and are shaped by digital technologies. This framework not only enhances our understanding of digital interactions and environments, it forges a new path for more nuanced and informed discussions about the role and impact of digital life in modern society.

Building on this framework, the collection examines various facets of digital literacy. Chen Chen (Utah State University) examines how tactical technological literacy shapes the experiences of participants in the “White Paper Movement”/”A4 Revolution” within the Chinese diaspora, emphasizing strategies to navigate oppressive technologies. Her study underscores the importance of integrating these insights into educational contexts to empower marginalized communities. Amber Buck (University of Alabama)’s study of Tuscaloosa Action highlights the nuanced digital literacy practices employed by activists combating racial gerrymandering in Alabama. Despite their efforts not resulting in policy adoption, Buck argues their digital texts effectively supported organizing efforts, challenging traditional definitions of success and failure in both digital and nondigital activism. In their article, Leah Heilig, Madison Jones, Ally Overbay, and Taylor Roberts (University of Rhode Island) explore the intersection of augmentive technologies with natural and built environments in their North Woods Project. They use deep mapping and cartographic literacy, informed by crip theory, to enhance environmental storytelling and accessibility, challenging distinctions between digital and analog experiences and advocating for inclusive approaches in educational settings. Philip B. Gallagher (Mercer University) and Marci J. Gallagher (Just Access LLC) explore aural information literacy and accessibility in their article “Accessible Sound: Aural Information Literacy for Technical Communication Design,” advocating for descriptive techniques, captions, transcription, and sign language. Their CRAFT framework provides strategies to enhance media accessibility, addressing challenges such as technological limitations and assumptions about hearing impairments. In their article, “The Digital ‘Good Life’: The Limits of Applying an Ethics of Care to a Company ‘Running with Scissors’,” authors Danielle Feldman Karr (Global ProAV Tech Company), Jared S. Colton (Utah State University), Steve Holmes (Texas Tech University) and Josephine Walwema (University of Washington) examine the challenges of implementing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) literacies in buyer persona platforms like HubSpot and FlowMapp. They analyze the successes and challenges of applying an ethics of care, informed by Graham’s Black feminist ethics, through the efforts of Dr. Danielle Feldman Karr to revise her design team’s buyer persona process. In “Writing in the “Twilight Zone” and Lessons for Inclusive Design,” Rachel Tofteland-Trampe (Hamline University) examines the negative emotions older women experience when using digital tools for job seeking and emphasizes the need for inclusive digital tools that address emotional dimensions and enhance lifelong digital literacy. Haley Swartz (Clemson University), explores biodigital literacy as an extension of digital health literacy in “Biodigital Literacy through Intimate Data: User Perceptions of FemTech and Pelvic Floor Training Devices.” Charles Woods (Texas A&M University-Commerce) and Gavin P. Johnson (Texas A&M University-Commerce) advocate for a new privacy literacy that encompasses digital design and AI in “(Re)Designing Privacy Literacy in the Age of Generative AI.”

By advocating for inclusive approaches and socially just practices, the contributors invite broader interdisciplinary engagement to reconceptualize digital literacy and its implications for personal, professional, and educational domains. Ultimately, this collaborative effort offers a structured framework that not only enhances our comprehension of digital life as a research field but also paves the way for more informed and equitable engagement with the digital world. The editors have created a groundbreaking contribution to the field, fostering deeper insights into the evolving landscape of digital life and its societal impacts. This issue exemplifies the opportunity to embrace a model of digital life that flexibly emphasizes and discusses the ongoing efforts to understand and enhance our post-human existence.

Overall, Stambler et al.’s (2024) avant-garde contribution lies not only in the framework’s creation and flexibility but also in its forward-looking perspective on enhancing our digital and post-human existence.