The Contingency of Digital Reading: A Postdigital Literacy Ecologies Approach to Local Configurations of Play and Learning

ABSTRACT This article examines the concept of digital reading through a postdigital lens, challenging deterministic views of technology's impact on reading practices. It explores the contingent nature of all digital reading through the concept of postdigital literacy ecologies, attending to the complex interplay between digital and analogue reading. Drawing on a case study of an Australian high school student's experiences with a game‐centered English curriculum, the paper demonstrates how digital reading practices within one local configuration were constituted intra‐actively with multiple phenomena, including curriculum and schooling, materiality, multisensory embodiment, and game design. The analysis reveals the blurring of boundaries between old and new literacy practices, the entanglement of analogue and digital elements, and the simultaneous rupture and continuity in reading experiences. The paper argues that understanding digital reading through the framework of postdigital literacy ecologies challenges both techno‐optimist and techno‐alarmist narratives associated with digital reading, revealing the complex, situated nature of contemporary reading practices. It calls for a reconsideration of how we conceptualize, teach, and assess reading in the postdigital age, emphasizing the need for pedagogies that acknowledge the entangled nature of digital reading.