The New Wiley Blackwell Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Digital Literacies INTRODUCTION In the past several decades, digital literacies have come to the forefront of popular and academic discussions about educational equity and so-called “twenty-first century skills.” Such discussions tend to focus on discrete, portable, and ostensibly universal technical skills 1 ; in this chapter, we outline a broader, anthropologically informed notion of digital literacies. Drawing from existing scholarship on literacies (digital and otherwise), linguistic anthropological work on digitally mediated interactions not explicitly labeled as literacies, and our own online and offline ethnographic research in Belgrade, Serbia and Greater Accra, Ghana, we propose an approach to digital literacies that: ● Emphasizes practices and dispositions over discrete skills and abilities; ● Foregrounds the communicative and affective aspects of such practices; ● Highlights the participatory, interactional nature of digital literacies over individualized capabilities; and ● Recognizes the larger ideological landscapes and hierarchies in which literacies are situated. In this perspective, digital literacies are best characterized as communicative competencies 2 situated within specific regimes of participation (see the section on “Digital Literacies in Regimes of Participation”). Digital literacies refer to a constellation of skills, practices, roles, and dispositions; even the most seemingly technical skills (e.g., turning on a computer, controlling a mouse, launching an application, or coding) are used in the service of interact- ing and participating in ongoing projects with others. Further, as shown by existing litera- ture and our own research, digital literacies can include the ability to produce and recognize genres of emotions (Ochs and Garro 2013) that are often specific to a particular medium. CHAPTER 12 Rachel Flamenbaum and Rachel George 1 www.battelleforkids/networks/p21.org. 2 Hymes (1972); Basso (1974); and Flamenbaum (2016). c12.indd 214 c12.indd 214 25-10-2022 17:59:56 25-10-2022 17:59:56