Written by: Gwénaëlle André
Abstract: This article examines how young adults experience digital technologies as pervasive,everyday companions rather than discrete tools. Moving beyond instrumental or skills-based accounts of digital literacy, the article adopts a longitudinal, sociomaterial perspective to explore how individuals and digital technologies co-evolve asymmetrically over time within broader social, cultural, and political contexts. Responding to recent calls for more critical and relational frameworks of digital literacies,the study articulates Gilbert Simondon’s concept of technical objects with Sylvia Wynter’s sociogenic principle to conceptualize digital literacy as a power-laden process of co-constitution where the trajectories of technical objects often constrain or redirect human agency. Empirically, the article drawson longitudinal ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023 in community settings in Canada, combining interviews, observations, and application walkthroughs. A vignette focusing on one participant’s evolving relationship with Instagram illustrates how processes of individuation and technological concretization intersect with issues of identity, validation, and inequality. The article makes three key contributions: a theoretical reorientation of digital literacy as relational and political; a methodological contribution through longitudinal sociomaterial ethnography; and a practical intervention in the form of an eleven-point manifesto aimed at guiding more collective, critical, and emancipatory approaches to digital literacy research and education.