Abstract
In the past several decades, digital literacies have come to the forefront of popular and academic discussions about educational equity and so-called ‘21st century skills.’ Such discussions tend to focus on discrete, portable, and ostensibly universal technical skills. In this chapter, we present a broader, anthropologically-informed notion of digital literacies. Drawing from existing scholarship on literacies (digital and otherwise), linguistic anthropological work on digitally-mediated interaction not explicitly labeled as literacies, and our own online and offline ethnographic research in Serbia and Ghana, we argue that digital literacies are best characterized as communicative competencies situated within specific regimes of participation. Bringing together enduring linguistic anthropological concerns around participation, affect, socialization, and ideologies, this perspective allows for an examination of the social, distributed, and political aspects of digital literacies at various levels of analysis—from the micro-interactional nuances of digitally-mediated talk; to the affordances for participation of physical hardware, software and virtual platforms, and networked infrastructures; to the larger ideological landscapes in which these interactions are embedded. To illustrate the utility of this approach, the chapter presents case studies of keyboard use and memetic circulation in Belgrade and Accra, highlighting that using even the most basic piece of hardware appropriately is informed by a situated array of interactional, ideological, and economic considerations.