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The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which self-tracking data have meaning and value in and after the life of the creator, including how such data could become part of the larger historical record, curated in an institutional archive. In doing so, the article expands upon existing shared interests among researchers working in the areas of self-tracking, human–computer interaction and archival science.

A total of 18 people who had self-tracked for six months or more were recruited for the study. Participants completed a survey which gathered demographic data and characteristics vis-à-vis their self-tracking behavior. In-person semi-structured interviews were then conducted to ascertain the beliefs of the participants regarding the long-term use and value of personal quantified-self data.

The findings reveal the value that people place on self-tracking data, their thoughts on proper modes for accessing their archive once it moves from the private to the public space, and how to provide fidelity within the system such that their experiences are represented while also enabling meaning making on the part of subsequent users of the archive.

Today’s quantified-self data are generally embedded in systems that create a pipeline from the individual source to that of the corporate warehouse, bent on absorbing and extracting insight from a totality of big data. This article posits that new opportunities for knowing and for design can be revealed when a public interest rationale is appended to rich personalized collections of small data.

This chapter presents the research questions, approaches, and arguments of the book, asking how our everyday lives with media have changed after the smartphone. I introduce the topic of media use in everyday life as an empirical, methodological, and theoretical research interest, and argue for its continued centrality to our digital society today, accentuated by datafication. I discuss how the analytical concepts of media repertories and public connection can inform research into media use in everyday life, and what it means that our societies and user practices are becoming more digital. The main argument of the book is that digital media transform our navigation across the domains of everyday life by blurring boundaries, intensifying dilemmas, and affecting our sense of connection to communities and people around us. The chapter concludes by presenting the structure of the rest of the book, where these arguments will be substantiated in analysis of media use an ordinary day, media use in life phase transitions, and media use when ordinary life is disrupted.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing mandates forced many young Australians to radically alter everyday interactions. Physical co-presence and embodied experience, a previously taken-for-granted dynamic of territorially embedded everyday lives, and interactions with urban surroundings, were reconfigured. Digital technology, while bringing people together for work, study, or socialising, is seen to dissolve material space, and mitigate geographic isolation. But what role does co-presence and embodied, spatially embedded experience play for young people living in the city? This chapter draws on the voices and experiences of young Australians aged 18–24 during the pandemic to clarify and understand the role of the digital in their everyday lives, how they negotiated disruptions to education, work, and managing relationships during the pandemic to articulate the relationships between digital lives and embodied experiences in the city.

To discuss two research projects, illuminating the ways in which digital technologies are both enfolded into people’s lives and open up new possibilities for practice that, in turn, have to be managed. To revisit this material to reflect on the benefits and limitations of in-depth interviewing for understanding the dynamics of new textual and visual forms of data in everyday life.

A broadly relational approach to technology and practice was employed, pursued through in-depth interviewing in two research projects about digitization and memory making.

In employing the qualitative method of in-depth interviewing to focus upon what people regularly do, the chapter shows how the material and mediating capacities of networked digital technologies such as cameras and smartphones are enacted and actively negotiated in relation to expectations and conventions about the temporality and visibility of personal life through diverse memory practices. These can be considered multiple ‘practices of adaptation’.

The research reported on provides some novel ways of thinking about devices and data in relation to practice.

This conclusion summarizes key insights from the former chapters, and highlights political dimensions of media use in digital everyday life. I particularly underline how our more digital everyday lives intensify communicative dilemmas, in which individuals in everyday settings negotiate with societal norms and power structures through their uses of media technologies. I also discuss how everyday media use connects us to different societal spheres and issues, also pointing to global challenges such as the pandemic and the climate crisis, arguing that everyday media use is key to our understandings of society. I discuss how to analyze this in media use research, emphasizing attention to processes of change and disruption.

This chapter analyzes what happens to media use when everyday life is suddenly disrupted, focusing on how the COVID-19 pandemic transformed work, socializing, communication and everyday living. The empirical case is changing media use in Norway during the pandemic, building on a qualitative questionnaire survey conducted in early lockdown, and follow-up interviews eight months later. Expanding on the ideas of destabilization of media repertoires developed in the former chapter, this analysis discusses transforming media repertoires as more digital, as less mobile (but still smartphone-centric) and as essentially social. The chapter further explains new concepts for pandemic media use practices, such as doomscrolling and Zoom fatigue.

Dubbed as the “first digital generation,” the millennials (or Generation Y) have been ensconced in digital technologies throughout their lives. As a demographic cohort, the eldest members of Generation Y were the first to reach adulthood by 2001, which heralded the third millennium, and were, therefore, called the millennials.

This research study theorizes that the millennials are ushering an emerging post-digital era that is redefining how we live, work, and play. By situating media consumption within a cross-disciplinary context of mediated engagement, this study analyzed how millennials consume media based on a 2019 meta-analytical research analysis of 22 cross-disciplinary studies, published between 2015 and 2019.

This research study analyzes how millennials curate and engage with digital media and information content in the midst of incessant evolutions of their identity, media use, and digital life. This study explicates six theoretical insights into how millennials consume information and engage with media. In their pursuit of easy access to media, the millennials get most of their information and media content from social media.

In theorizing how millennials engage with digital media, this study explicates important conceptual trends such as incidental news exposure (INE), which refers to people stumbling upon news stories they otherwise would not have purposefully seen or sought. INE spawns “bumpers” who involuntarily bump into news items, as opposed to “seekers” who actively search or seek news content. This leads to the news-finds-me mindset among some passive news consumers who rely and expect other active news consumers to share important news and information.

The purpose of this paper is to explore social living labs as a participatory methodology and context for fostering digital literacy and community well-being. This approach is examined through a case study of Food Rescue Townsville, a voluntary community organisation in North Queensland, Australia.

Using qualitative case study methodology, the research investigated volunteers’ experience of a social living lab where they selected, installed and used open source Food Rescue Robot software.

The social living lab enhanced volunteers’ digital literacy and the organisation’s efficiency. The participatory nature and transformative intentions of social living labs are similar to action research as both promote social change through collaboration.

The case study intentionally focuses on one community organisation to gain in-depth insights of a real-life social living lab.

The paper models an innovative approach that contributes to community learning and well-being. It presents a social living labs framework for digital literacy development that is underpinned by participatory action research cycle and integrates informed learning principles. Social living labs provide a learning context and approach that extends beyond digital skills instruction to a holistic process of using information to learn. They enable individuals to participate as digital citizens in the creation, curation and use of digital information.

Informed digital learning through social living labs addresses the digital divide by fostering digital participation, volunteering and community engagement.

The paper is of interest to researchers, information literacy educators and community groups. Theoretical insights and participatory practices of the Food Rescue Townsville case, and the proposed social living labs framework are transferable to other communities.

Online environments have become a central part of our social, private, and economic life. The term for this is “digital existence,” characterized as a new epoch in mediated experience. Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in how online abuse impacts one's digital existence. Drawing on 15 interviews with women, this chapter demonstrates a type of labor—which I call “ontological labor”—that women exercise when processing their own experiences of online abuse, and when sharing their experiences with others. Ontological labor is the process of overcoming a denial of experience. In the case of online abuse, this denial stems partly from the treatment of online and offline life as separate and opposing. This division is known as digital dualism, which I argue is a discourse that denies women the space to have their experiences of online abuse recognized as such.