Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780367348588

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Rodney Jones has written the book our moment needs. Literacies of Repair refuses the easy story that ‘the internet broke us’ and instead offers a humane, systemic way to mend—beginning with how people actually live, feel, learn, and act together. Jones moves beyond checklist ‘digital skills’ to show how action, attention, affect, affinity, visibility, truth, and humanity intertwine in real practices. This is not a cynical autopsy of platforms; it’s a design manual for communities who want to reclaim agency—what he calls agencing—and cultivate cultures of care."" James Paul Gee, Regents’ Professor, Emeritus, Arizona State University

Author Information

Rodney H. Jones is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Digital Media in the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading, UK. He has published widely in the fields of digital literacies, health communication, and language and creativity.

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