In earlier editor’s letters, I sketched the contours of a theory of the digital society. I emphasized that the digital society is a choice, not an inevitable consequence of tech innovation. I also theorized that a digital society is decentralized, in the sense that it is a composite of human, technical, and other types of actors, all inhabiting socio-technical and natural environments; decentralizing the digital society is important to question dominant human-centric perspectives (especially related to AI), in favour of an ethico-political approach that prioritises relationality, care, and responsibility (Russo, 2023, 2024a, 2024b).  

On this occasion, I return to the question of choosing the digital society, but not from the perspective of its designFootnote 1. I’m instead interested in how we can choose to live in the digital society. I shall address this question from the perspective of literacy: media, data, digital, AI literacy, and all its variants.

My reflections on literacy, and especially data literacy, began in the context of a Bachelor course that I had set up at the University of Amsterdam in the academic year 2022-23. We offered the course to all 3rd-year Bachelor students across various programmes. The course was designed to give students a broad understanding of data. A particular design choice was to open the course with a ‘hands on’ session in which student could directly see what it is to manipulate a large data set, followed by some lectures on the history and philosophy of data: What is data? When did data became ‘big’? What does it mean to digitalize data handling processes? How does data travel across large digital-analogue infrastructures? The idea was that, with a solid grip on these questions, issues of governance and ethics would acquire a more profound meaning. In particular, through an ‘hands on’ session and through some epistemology and history of data, the students achieved a better understanding of data in their own fields, in other areas, and in everyday practices (from clicking consent to cookies to the consequences of sharing contents on social media). What to do with data was grounded in a solid understanding of what data is. The experiment, judging from students’ participation in class, from the course evaluations, and from the results of exams, was a success: investing in foundational questions at the level of humanities and social sciences is an asset for addressing applied questions related to data governance and ethics.

I have always considered a distinct humanities dimension of this course an added value. Yet, having engaged with the work of Annette Markham (Markham, 2019, 2020; Markham & Pronzato, 2024; Pronzato & Markham, 2023), I clearly see that a humanities component is not enough for a data / media / digital / AI literacy course. Since at least a decade, Markham has used methods from autoethnography and critical pedagogy in her courses on digital literacy. As I shall explain in a moment, with this, Markham has introduced a fundamental personal, experiential dimension in a literacy trajectory.

Autoethnography (Bochner, 2013) is a method, as the name suggests, that an individual can use to self-reflect on their own habits, practices, or behaviour. Critical pedagogy, as initiated by Paulo Freire (1970), is an approach that considers awareness and critical thinking essential to a pedagogical trajectory. Markham (and collaborators) have used these two approaches in combination to guide students understand how they live in digital spaces; a structured reflection on their own digital habits is instrumental to developing a critical stance towards their digital practices; the courses offered to these students are also designed to suggest alternatives, for instance trying out ‘media fast’ (i.e., a voluntary and often temporary disconnection from digital devices and social media). Markham has given students assignments such as writing diaries about their digital habits, reporting on how they feel when they are disconnected, and thus developing deeper awareness of how they consume social media and more generally how they live in the digital spaces they inhabit.

Large part of the debate around digital literacyFootnote 2 concerns the competences and skills individuals should develop to ‘function’ in a digital society: how expert do we need to become in using a computer or a phone? What aspects of using and customizing digital devices do we need to master? Instead, an autoethnography and critical literacy approach posits that self-reflection should come first. Digital literacy is first a question of understanding how we live in a digital environment and then of mastering technicalities of digital devices and infrastructures.

This approach is grounded in large bodies of literature and school of thoughts, starting from the Frankfurt School to surveillance and critical data studiesFootnote 3. The courses offered by Markham and colleagues, however, do not tackle these theories directly and openly with students. Instead, they ‘operationalise’ ideas and approaches developed within these rich and fundamental scholarships into activities and exercises to build and foster digital literacy as a form of self-awareness.

This way of unpacking digital literacy gives to the question of choosing the digital society an altogether different dimension. Digital society is not only grand infrastructure, (big or less big) tech companies, digitalization processes, etc. To choose the digital society we must also consider the individual-level. The level of society, infrastructure, and governance, in fact, has a distinct, concrete counterpart: our own use of digital technologies, our own behaviour in digital environments. While some part of our habits and behaviour is forced upon us (for instance, the university de facto moved to digital infrastructures for handling teaching and assessment), we still do have margin to make conscious choices about how we inhabit these spaces (for instance, I can still choose how available I am on Teams through a regular working day).

There are recurring complaints that digital technologies make us available 24/7, that they ‘eat’ our attention, etc. Markham’s theory of social echolocation (Markham, 2021) shows that learning to disconnect can be a way of learning how one wants to be connected. Media fasting can thus be seen not just as a moment to ‘detox’ from overwhelming digital environments, but instead as a way of turning what has been called ‘FOMO’ (Fear Of Missing Out) into a conscious choice of what we want to be part of, exposed to, etc. – a kind of WOMO – Willingness Of Missing Out, or, to be more constructive a ‘Pick What You Wanna See’ (which would turn into a horrible acronym!). The goal of a media fast is not to return to an alleged pre-digital era, but to regain our ‘locus of control’ with respect to digital environments.

As mentioned earlier, Markham’s approach to define literacy (data, digital, …) beyond skills and competences adds a personal and experiential dimension that is fundamental, and that can give further relevance to humanities approaches that tackle data literacy from a philosophy and history of science perspective. The autoethnographic and critical pedagogy lens is more than an addition to the basket of approaches to use in setting up a course on digital literacy. It is a call for researchers and teachers to take an active role and stance. As scholars in relevant fields related to technology and media, our role is not just to convey knowledge; we are primarily and foremost educators, in the etymological sense of the word.

Markham and collaborators have worked, over the years, with thousands of students across different countries. What an opportunity has this been for these students! Markham’s sustained effort and dedication is commendable, and at the same time raises important questions about how to reach out to the wider public, to younger generations, to older generations, to vulnerable groups, etc.

All these challenges are very well-known in the field of literacy, and yet they need to be asked again. Education – and especially higher education – is a privilege that not everyone can afford to have. Our sense of duty, and that of relevant organisations and institutions, should lead us to offer these powerful approaches to as many groups as possible. We need programmes – at national and international level – that allow the level of intertwinement of theory and practice that Markham has shown in her work. We do need to go to the field, but we also need solid theories behind it. And once we are in the field, we also need to reflect back on our theoretical background.

Engaging with the practice of Markham’s work, in particular, has allowed me to further elaborate on the theory of the digital society that I began sketching in my editorials. In particular, a theory of the digital society also needs to consider the individual, as root of a more distinct social dimension. Often, attention to the individual level is used as a disguised excuse to dump responsibilities on to the individual, while they are societal (of the government, of big tech, …). This is routinely done in the health domain: food labelling displaces the responsibility of consuming junk food entirely to the individual, while it is also a responsibility of food industry, policy makers, and politicians. In the digital sphere, the situation is no different. Think of GDPR compliance: it is now our choice whether to consent to the use of cookies to access online contents. It is of course also an individual responsibility, but transparency on its own is not a guarantee that responsibility will lie where it should be.

On top of questions of responsibility, I am worried that an analysis of the digital society that goes down to the individual level, without proper inclusion of the individual into a socio-technical context, will reproduce schemes that we know already from methodological individualism (Zahle and Collin, 2014) . Philosophers of social science and social scientists will recognize the terms of the debate: if we take a holistic view, society is governed by forces that individuals have little grip on and few possibilities to contrast. This is not a question of determinism or free will, but of the constraints that culture, habits, and social forces impose on individual action. Conversely, approaches that take the individual as the basic unit of analysis will place agency at the individual level, but suddenly the societal level will be a mere (statistical) aggregation of individual actions. A digital society encapsulates these tensions too, and we need to understand individuals in a social (socio-technical) contexts and at the same time consider the importance of individual-level actions to influence and drive change at the societal (socio-technical) level.

We can solve the tension between the individual and social level, at least in the context of the digital society, by embracing the ‘4-body’ approach as it has been developed by Elif Kuş Saillard (2026). Kuş Saillard, a practicing qualitative researcher with a sociology background, has proposed an approach in which we understand individuals as having an (i) embodied body, (ii) a social body, (iii) a techno-body, and (iv) a earth-body. The identification of these four bodies is not meant to separate these dimensions but precisely to see how they are interconnected. Emphasis on the body serves the purposes of locating, materially, individuals in their bodies as well as in their social contexts, in their interactions with technical instruments, and with the natural environment. By conceptually identifying 4 bodies, we can in fact re-connect all these dimensions in the unity of our lived experience. The autoethnography and critical pedagogy approach of Markham aligns well with this conceptual lens. Practicing media fast – and thereby developing critical reflection and awareness of our digital habits and preferences – is a way of re-establishing connections with our embodied, social, and earth body, and to make more conscious choices about our techno-body. But precisely because our bodies are not disconnected islands, the ink between the social and the techno-body is fundamental – and it is something that we choose, rather than something that we endure.

A theory of the digital society notwithstanding, in practice we need stronger forms of public engagements: in teaching, with citizens, in our personal circles. Digital society is not ‘out there’ or made of ‘Durkheimian’ social forces pre-existing us, and existing outside of our psychological, biological, socially embodied dimension. Digital society starts with us, and with every concrete action we take. A critical pedagogy and autoethnography approach is thus not just for students, but an essential exercise we should all engage with, pretty much like brushing our teeth every day, twice a day.