Digital orientations: “Ways of the hand” and practical knowing in media uses and other manual activities

Opening (a laptop and inbox)

I begin with a description of something that I do routinely most mornings to start my working day, typically at the kitchen table—opening my laptop computer to check my email inbox. Gently applying pressure to the base of the machine with the thumb of my right hand, my left-hand thumb lifts the lid while the other fingers of that hand lie on top. My right-hand index finger then slides from right to left across the touch-pad, moving the cursor until it is located over an area in the middle of the screen marked “Locked.” Here I tap the left side of the touch-pad to reveal my desktop display or the document that I was last working on (it is rare for me to have shut down the computer the previous day, as I am in the habit of just closing the lid). The same finger then slides downwards on the touch-pad until the cursor lies over the Internet-search symbol that appears on the bar across the bottom of my screen, before tapping again to open my search page. Next, the right-hand index finger slides upwards to position the cursor over a “Bookmark” link to the web app for my university’s email system. Tapping here brings up a page with another link that reads “Login to Staff Email.” Now I slide and tap a further time on the touch-pad to bring up the page on which I am required to give my user name and password. These are then keyed in at the appropriate on-screen locations, usually with my right-hand index finger and two of the fingers of my left hand (but occasionally, say if I am holding a glass of juice or a cup of tea in my right hand, with three of the fingers of my left hand). At one moment in the course of this activity, there is usually a rapid sliding and tapping of the right-hand index finger to shift between locations, and, at another, my left-hand index finger presses “Caps Lock” before returning to cancel that command a moment later. After the smallest finger of my right hand then presses the “Enter” key, I am into my inbox. (I make no claims for this being the most efficient way of accessing my email—it is simply a description of what I ordinarily and habitually do.)

Although that opening description is basic, writing it still proved difficult. I had to keep stopping to go online and access my email. Without actually performing the ordered, unfolding series of actions repeatedly, noting carefully the movement of my hands as I went along, I would not have been able to write those words. This is because the practices involved are typically performed in an unreflective, taken-for-granted manner (at least without much thought being given to the activities themselves, and yet I may well be thinking about something else, such as an email message that I need to send or the document that I will continue to work on after checking my inbox). The knowledge that I have of my-laptop-in-use—of my position in relation to the touch-pad and keys and of how to find ways about there, but also of the cursor’s movements on the screen and the way to go to my inbox—is an embodied and sensuous knowledge. My dealings with the computer have a visual dimension (an aural dimension too, given the gentle sounds of tapping and key-pressing). However, my looking and, more generally, my practical knowing are inextricably caught up with the movements of my fingers or digits, and with their familiar feel—their being at home—on the machine. To borrow David Sudnow’s words from a different context (I will be discussing his work in due course), what have developed, over time, are particular “ways of the hand” (Sudnow, 2001), and in the pages ahead I want to explore further such mobile, generative ways—emphasising matters of movement and dwelling or of orientation and habitation, which I consider to be crucial for the study of media uses. In doing so, I will be reflecting on a range of other manual activities that are apparently unrelated to media use, and taking what may seem like detours into the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. I turn first to phenomenological philosophy and to the account of habit acquisition that can be found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (see Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, pp. 164–169). There, two of the examples that he discusses are of keyboard use.

Habit, typing, and organ playing

Merleau-Ponty’s first example of keyboard use features the activity of typing (remember that he was writing back in the mid 20th century, when the typewriter was not the outmoded technology it is today). He notes that routine typewriter users cultivated—over time, in their relations with the banks of keys—“a knowledge bred of familiarity … which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, p. 166). Take these users (or their present-day counterparts, who press on computer keyboards) away from their machines and they would probably struggle to describe the layout of the keys that they have come to know so well in practice, through the movement and touch of their fingers. Perhaps only the activity of air-typing would enable users, in those circumstances, to get anywhere close to an accurate description. Merleau-Ponty (1962/2002, p. 166) refers to their practical knowing as “knowledge in the hands.” It is, he stresses, part of a broader bodily knowledge, and his more general argument is that “it is the body which ‘understands’ in the acquisition of habit … it is the body which ‘catches’ and ‘comprehends’ movement” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, pp. 165–167). He is aware that for many of his readers this argument “will appear absurd” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, p. 167), since it challenges the rationalist assumptions of much work in the philosophical tradition, yet he insists that “the phenomenon of habit is just what prompts us to revise our notion of ‘understand’ and our notion of the body.” ¹

A second example of keyboard use features organ playing, and here Merleau-Ponty follows his interests in the comprehending body (in this case, in-the-feet as well as in-the-hands knowledge is important, because the traditional organ is a musical instrument with pedals to operate, as well as keys to press and stops to pull). The main purpose of this example, though, is to make a point about the adaptability—the generative capacity—of such practical, embodied, and sensuous understanding. He writes:

It is known that an experienced organist is capable of playing an organ which he does not know. … He needs only an hour’s practice to be ready to perform his programme. … During the rehearsal … preceding the concert, he … sits on the seat, works the pedals, pulls out the stops, gets the measure of the instrument with his body, incorporates … the relevant directions and dimensions, settles into the organ as one settles into a house. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, pp. 167–168)

Merleau-Ponty (1962/2002, p. 169) is quite clear in his view that habitual practices involve the formation of “stable dispositional tendencies,” but his example of the experienced organist—who “settles into” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, p. 168) an instrument which is not the one “he is used to playing”—serves to indicate that, along with stability, bodily dispositions have a certain degree of flexibility and a significant improvisational quality (see also Bourdieu, 1977, 1990, whose concept of habitus is another attempt to get at these dispositions that are both durable and transposable). Based on extensive previous experience of musical performance, the organ player is able to adapt to—to find ways about—the new organ’s slightly different layout, getting “the measure of the instrument with his body” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, p. 168) just as “the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank space” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, p. 167). It is worth noting, too, that Merleau-Ponty links matters of orientation and habitation, comparing the preconcert rehearsal with settling into a house.

More recently, there have been some interesting academic discussions of manual activity and dexterity that complement Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on keyboard use. Philosopher Raymond Tallis (2003, pp. 29–30) writes of “the knowing hand,” which has an “exquisite knowledge of the size, shape, surface, texture, density … etc. of the object it manipulates,” and architect Juhani Pallasmaa (2009)—in his work on “the thinking hand”—explores notions of “embodied wisdom” and “sensory thought.” Along similar lines, Richard Sennett (2009, pp. 149–155), a sociologist who identifies himself with the philosophical perspective of pragmatism, discusses the idea of “the intelligent hand” in his account of skilled craft practices—but it is to the work of another philosophically inspired sociologist, to Sudnow’s Ways of the Hand (2001), that I turn next, to consider a number of the descriptions that he gives of his own practices of learning to play jazz on the piano.

The formation of jazzful hands

Near to the start of Sudnow’s story about the development of his jazz-making ways of the hand, he remarks that: “Anyone who’s witnessed or been a beginning pianist or guitarist learning chords notices substantial initial awkwardness” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 12). This difficulty is evident in the novice player’s “searching and looking … groping to put each finger in a good spot … trying to get a hold on chords properly … to get from one to the next, playing progressions smoothly” (Sudnow, 2001, pp. 12–13). Writing of his early experiences of learning to play chords and chord progressions on the piano, he recalls how (over the course of several months’ practice): “Looking’s work load progressively lightens … the gaze at the keyboard progressively diffuses in function. … As I reached for chords … for recurring patterns of them … I was … developing an embodied way of accomplishing distance” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 15). Indeed, after several years of playing the instrument, Sudnow (2001, p. 16) confidently states that “with eyes closed, I may now sit down at the piano, gain an initial orientation with the merest touch … and then reach out to bring my finger precisely into a spot two feet off to the left.” In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, Sudnow’s body got “the measure of the instrument” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, p. 168), and the keyboard space—or the “directions and dimensions” of his dealings with the piano—came to be gradually incorporated over time.

Subsequent difficulties faced by Sudnow, though, in his learning to play the piano, had to do with acquiring skills of jazz improvisation. He recalls being puzzled on occasion by the “interweaving intricacies” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 28) of his piano teacher’s hand movements on the keyboard: “I’d ask ‘what was that?’ He’d ask ‘what was what?’ … he’d have a hard time finding what he’d just done. He’d at times remark … ‘I … can’t tell you how … you’ll develop a feel for it.’” ² Developing this feel for improvisation was, for Sudnow, a long—and often frustrating—process of figuring out new ways to go with his fingers in the unfolding practice of playing. Still, he reports that after a while there began to emerge “up-a-little-down-a-little ways, rocking ways and every-other-finger ways … skipping ways, hopping ways, rippling ways … and more” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 59). His hands were increasingly becoming “wayfully oriented” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 69), until eventually, as he puts it, “the hand knew its ways” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 114). Sudnow (2001, p. 125) had reached a stage at which, in his words: “I don’t think at all about where I’m going. My hands make it up as they go along.”

Sudnow (2001, p. 2) characterises jazz-piano improvisation as “an extraordinary domain of action,” and yet—no doubt with an eye to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy (see Sudnow, 2001, p. 131, for his acknowledgement that Merleau-Ponty was a major “source of … inspiration”)—he goes on to draw a parallel between piano playing and the activity of typing, also finding the latter to be a remarkably skilled accomplishment. Just as the beginning pianist experiences “substantial initial awkwardness” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 12), so it is the case that: “The beginning typist may find himself spelling every word as he types, thinking of the spellings as a step-by-step search … looking … for correct places” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 136). However, in the case of the experienced typist (and, by extension, the experienced computer-keyboard user): “The hands behave spellingly” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 136). Once again, in Sudnow’s terms, looking’s work load has lightened and the fingers have learned to accomplish distance—reaching for the correct keys without hesitation. They move at speed in the flow of practice, just as Sudnow’s hands came to behave “jazzfully” on the piano. Equally, whilst I accept that jazz-piano improvisation is a rare skill acquired over a lengthy period, I can see no reason why further parallels should not be drawn—between piano playing or typing and various contemporary uses of technology, including certain sorts of media use that are now widely regarded as ordinary domains of action. For example, I would want to argue that the rapidly moving, knowledgeable thumbs of the experienced text-sender have also come to “behave spellingly” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 136)—even if the spellings that appear on mobile-phone screens are not always those found in a dictionary (see Tomlinson, 2007, p. 108, on the “remarkable dexterities” of text messaging and on other acts of “accessing and communicating via … keypads”).

Overall, Sudnow’s book is of interest to me here not only because it offers a detailed account of the formation of embodied, sensuous, in-the-hands knowledge, but also because—in doing so—it manages to point to crucial matters of movement and dwelling or of orientation and habitation, which are of broader significance for studies of everyday life. This significance is highlighted by Hubert Dreyfus (2001, pp. ix–xiii) in his foreword to the book, where he describes Sudnow’s work as one instance of “a phenomenology of how we come to find our way about in the world” (focused on piano playing but more generally concerned with what Dreyfus calls “the magic … the … body performs” as it moves around). Throughout the book, Sudnow writes about his acquisition of the habit of piano playing in terms of moving through and thereby inhabiting an environment or setting. He refers to “the finger’s journey” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 63) and to having “gained handful command over myriad varieties of paths” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 125), and he ends his story by reflecting on how “this jazz music is, first and foremost, particular ways of moving from place to place” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 127). Habitual movement or routinely going along “in a terrain nexus of hands and keyboard” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 127) is precisely what enabled him to come to feel at home in a setting of keys, and he writes explicitly of pianists’ bodily relations to their keyboards as a “dwelling” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 134). The keyboard space is inhabited as it gets incorporated. Indeed, there can be a feeling of at-homeness, too, within the musical sounds that are produced—a kind of dwelling that is potentially open to and shareable with nonplaying audience members who are engaged in embodied practices of listening. While these listeners do not have the same knowledge in the hands that the pianist has developed, their corporeal, emotional, with-the-ears involvement in the performance may still involve a journeying along paths—as they sense the musician’s “wayful series of moves” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 72) and are themselves, in this process, moved by the sounds (for a fuller consideration of “musical motion,” see the penultimate chapter in Johnson, 2007).

Wayfaring, plank sawing, and narrative

The contemporary academic whose work is, in my view, most productively concerned with movement and dwelling is a philosophically inspired anthropologist, Tim Ingold (see especially Ingold, 2000, 2007, 2011). In his writings on “the idea of life as lived along lines, or wayfaring” (Ingold, 2011, p. xii), he strongly asserts “the primacy of movement” (see also Sheets-Johnstone, 2011), and this emphasis on movement has emerged out of his earlier advocacy of what he calls a dwelling perspective—an approach that focuses, in his words, on inhabitants’ “immersion … in an environment” and on how they come to “‘feel their way’ through a world that is itself in motion, continually coming into being” (Ingold, 2000, pp. 153–155). Although he has very little to say about the uses of modern media of communication—and whilst I find his general view of “modern metropolitan societies” (Ingold, 2007, p. 75) to be problematic (because it is too pessimistic about the direction of social change)—I believe that Ingold’s work on wayfaring and on “practical engagement with … lived-in environments” (Ingold, 2000, p. 168) has much to offer the field of media studies (see Moores, 2012, in press). Here, in the context of my particular interest in manual activities, I consider a specific example from Ingold’s writings—a commentary that he offers on his own embodied practices of sawing through a plank while making a set of bookshelves (Ingold, 2011, pp. 53–61). This will then lead me into a broader consideration of Ingold’s reflections on what he terms the “alongly integrated” character of “inhabitant knowledge” (Ingold, 2007, p. 89) and on storylines or narratives as a type of “movement from place to place” (Ingold, 2011, p. 161).

Ingold starts his discussion of plank sawing with a description (the description with which I began this article has a similar style). Just a little way in, he writes:

I place the palm of my left hand on the plank … grasping it around the edge by the fingers. Taking up a saw with my right hand, I wrap my fingers around the handle—all, that is, except the index finger, which is extended along the flat of the handle, enabling me to fine-tune the direction of the blade. … I … position my head so that it is directly above the tool. … From this angle … I can see the wood on either side of the cut. The first strokes are crucial, since the further the cut goes, the less room there is for manoeuvre. After a while, however, I can relax my gaze and settle down to a rhythmic … movement. (Ingold, 2011, p. 51)

In his subsequent commentary, he discusses issues of immersion and incorporation—highlighting the “synergy of practitioner, tool and material” (Ingold, 2011, p. 56)—and he touches on wider themes of embodied and sensuous knowledge that also feature in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Sudnow. ³ However, in doing so, he makes an important point about bodily responsiveness that I have not considered explicitly thus far, and he seeks to relate studies of manual activity to issues of pedestrian movement (on “the world perceived through the feet” and on “ways of walking,” see Ingold, 2004; Ingold & Lee Vergunst, 2008).

Let me deal briefly with those last two things that I mentioned. Much earlier in the article, when remarking on my laptop use, I noted that routinely accessing my email is something I do in an unreflective, taken-for-granted manner—in the sense that little thought is directly devoted to its doing. Even so, unreflective practices of this sort must not be understood as unresponsive in character. For Ingold (2011, p. 61), then, “the skilled handling of tools is … rhythmically responsive to ever-changing environmental conditions.” Crucially, he adds that: “This … responsiveness … is not the awareness of a mind … aloof from the … hands-on business of work. It is rather immanent in practical, perceptual activity” (Ingold, 2011, p. 61; as in the playing of a musical instrument, where “enskilment … is inseparable from doing,” see Ingold, 2000, p. 416). Ingold’s interest is also in what he calls “the processional quality of tool use” (Ingold, 2011, p. 53)—when sawing a plank, this involves moving through joined-up phases of “getting ready, setting out, carrying on and finishing off”—and he chooses to equate the activities of sawing and walking, in which each “step” follows another and anticipates the next in a continuous, flowing “processional … order.” “Like going for a walk,” states Ingold (2011, p. 53), “sawing a plank has the character of a journey” (and the experienced carpenter moves along paths “like the wayfarer who travels from place to place,” see Ingold, 2011, p. 59).

Indeed, when Ingold (2011, p. 4) introduces the latest collection of his essays, Being Alive, he suggests that life itself has this processional quality, declaring that “every being is instantiated in the world as a path of movement along a way of life”—and adding, a few pages on, that “wayfaring is the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the earth” (Ingold, 2011, p. 12). This is precisely his idea that life is “lived along lines” (Ingold, 2011, p. xii), coupled with his assertion of the “primacy” of movement (his linking of movement and dwelling is evident there too). At the heart of Ingold’s anthropological project are phenomenological questions about orientation and habitation—and perhaps the privileging of such matters in his work could best be illustrated by his pivotal claim that: “Inhabitants … know as they go” (Ingold, 2011, p. 154). The claim is one that he first made in slightly different terms in a previous collection of essays, The Perception of the Environment (Ingold, 2000). There, he insists that everyday skills of orientation—of knowing “one’s whereabouts” (Ingold, 2000, p. 219) and the “way to go” in a familiar setting—involve a wayful understanding (an alongly integrated knowledge that is formed on the move), which can be contrasted with the “upwardly integrated” (Ingold, 2007, p. 89) knowledge of a terrain that is produced by surveyors and cartographers (Ingold, 2000, pp. 219–223, is especially keen to dispute psychological accounts of movement which rely on the concept of a mental or cognitive “map”). From the point of view of those who work in media studies, it is interesting that Ingold (2011, pp. 159–161) also refers to inhabitants’ practical knowing-as-they-are-going as a kind of “storied knowledge” (drawing on de Certeau, 1984, p. 110, who wrote of the “unfolding … stories” of walking in the city), and this brings me to the topic of narrative.

Proposing that involvement in a story—not only through its telling but also through the hearing or reading of a narrative—might best be understood as a moving around, Ingold (2007, p. 90) remarks that “the storyline goes along,” and he proceeds to state that “the epitome of alongly integrated knowledge is the story … in the story, as in life, it is in … movement … that knowledge is integrated” (Ingold, 2011, pp. 160–161). ⁴ His reflections on practices of reading feature cases that are far from contemporary (for reasons I will explain in a moment), but they do focus helpfully on matters of orientation and habitation. For example:

Commentators from the Middle Ages … would time and again compare reading to wayfaring, and … the page to an inhabited landscape … to read … was to retrace a trail through the text. … The reader … would inhabit the world of the page, proceeding from word to word. (Ingold, 2007, p. 91)

In this extract, I am fascinated by the notion of reading as wayfaring—and by the idea that pages are inhabited landscapes with paths or trails through them—but Ingold’s use of the past tense and his reference to the Middle Ages are significant, because this text that is inhabited by the reader is a handwritten manuscript rather than “a modern typed or printed composition” (Ingold, 2007, p. 91), and, in his view, the difference is important. According to Ingold (2007, p. 92), “the modern reader surveys the page as if from a great height … he does not inhabit it.” As I indicated earlier, I have a problem with that overly pessimistic perspective on social change, which in his work is coupled with a reluctance to consider recent cases of media use in everyday life. I struggle to see how, through changes in technology, readers (and media users more generally) could have ceased to be wayfarers or inhabitants who know as they go—to be turned, uniformly, into surveyors of texts. My preference is for Ingold’s more optimistic view, expressed in another context, that ultimately life’s entangled “meshwork of … myriad lines … will not be contained” (Ingold, 2007, p. 103) in conditions of modernity.

For a nonrepresentational, non-media-centric approach

Media theorists and researchers do not usually spend much time thinking about manual activities such as typing and sawing or organ and piano playing. Neither are movements of the hands and fingers (or the feet) typically high on the agenda in the field of media studies. Of course, there are many notable examples of work done in media studies and neighbouring disciplines on bodies, technologies, and the senses. To take just a few of these examples, Marshall McLuhan (1964/1994, p. 90) declared many years ago that “all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems,” and, more recently, Don Ihde (1990) has offered a valuable phenomenological perspective on human–technology embodiment relations (see also Ihde, 2002), while Mark Paterson (2007, pp. 127–145) has written interestingly on digital media as “technologies of touch” (see also Cranny-Francis, 2013), and Ingrid Richardson (2008) has reflected on “the bodily incorporation of mobile media” (see also Richardson & Wilken, 2012). The purpose of my article (especially the apparent detours within it) is to try to push this kind of work forward in a particular direction, though, by proposing that we might now productively begin our investigations of media use in everyday life by attending to mobile, generative ways of the hand that is at home with communication technologies—detailing the processional, ordered quality of media uses. My opening description of accessing an email inbox serves as an initial indication of how we may proceed with this task.

Such investigations in media studies would necessarily be part of a larger project straddling several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. I have referred in the preceding pages to phenomenological perspectives from philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, and from the discipline of geography Nigel Thrift (1996, 2007) makes the case for an overlapping “non-representational” approach, which deals, for example, with “the sensuousness of practice” (Thrift, 1996, p. 1) and with “the way in which the … body interacts with … things” (Thrift, 2007, p. 10), such as technologies of travel and telecommunications. ⁵ This larger phenomenological or nonrepresentational project is a “non-media-centric” (Moores, 2012, pp. 103–110; Morley, 2009) one, because at its heart is a concern with movement and dwelling—with “how we come to find our way about in the world” (Dreyfus, 2001, p. ix) and so make ourselves at home there—rather than any exclusive interest in media issues. Nevertheless, for those of us who are located in media studies, an important contribution that we can make to the wider interdisciplinary effort is to consider what David Morley (2007, p. 1) terms the “particularities” of media, while not “reifying their status and thus isolating them from the … contexts in which they operate.” In my discussion so far, I have tended to place an emphasis on the characteristics that media uses have in common with the routine uses of other equipment—focusing on the manual dexterities (and, more generally, the bodily rhythms and corporeal understandings) that are involved in practices ranging from checking an email inbox to sawing through a wooden plank—and yet, to take these specific examples, the laptop computer and the hand saw clearly have distinctive applications as work tools. Communicating with colleagues or preparing a document with a saw is not advisable, and cutting wood with a computer is probably difficult!

What helps to distinguish my laptop from Ingold’s saw is what I am calling the “doubly digital” quality of contemporary media (not only of computers or mobile phones but of television sets with their remote-control devices too, and of course this list could be extended to include several new mobile media technologies—such as the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch—that are operated by a sliding and tapping of fingers on touch-screens). My laptop gives me access to numerous media settings that are “continually coming into being” (Ingold, 2000, p. 155) in my dealings with the machine, some of which I adapt to on the basis of extensive previous experience of online environments while others are negotiated on a more regular basis and experienced as thoroughly familiar spaces of movement. ⁶ The email inbox is one of these familiar spaces, and I know my way around it (I inhabit it) just as my fingers find their way about and have come to feel at home in a setting of touch-pad and keys. Indeed, the crucial point I am making here is that—despite a tendency for academics to have associated so-called virtual worlds with ideas of disembodiment—online wayfaring (to extend the application of Ingold’s concept) is intimately caught up with the habitual movement of human hands, involving deft movements of the fingers or digits on keyboards and various touch-sensitive devices. Hence the playful title of my article. There are digital orientations of two, closely related types in media uses today—and I prefer to make sense of this responsive feeling-a-way-through environments in terms of alongly integrated practical knowing, wayfaring, and orientation as opposed to navigation, since the more conventional notion of navigating spaces is too much associated with cartographic representation and the idea of a cognitive map.

Finally, I should stress that I am not alone in venturing down this path—with my arguments here concerning media uses and “interdependent ‘mobilities’” (Urry, 2007, p. 47). The contemporary academic whose perspective is perhaps closest to mine is Sarah Pink (2012). She does not choose to highlight, as I am doing, movements of the hands and fingers. However, her talk of online environments “that we participate in as we move through” (Pink, 2012, p. 46), and of “ecologies that span online and offline worlds,” evidently resonates with my own words in this article. Pink’s writing on digital media uses and settings, which comes out of a wider concern that she has with everyday activities and sensory engagements, occasionally draws on Ingold’s conceptual vocabulary. For example, she describes her Facebook page as a “‘meshwork’ … of stories or narratives that are often previously unrelated, … interwoven … on the screen of a computer or mobile device and … lived … as part of everyday life” (Pink, 2012, pp. 136–137). These entangled narratives on her Facebook page are also woven into a more complex, extensive meshwork of movements, and an indication of that complexity is offered in the following account of her moving through multiple environments—from place to place—in a way that she experiences as quite ordinary:

Much of what people … do online is increasingly multi-platform … and engages different platforms simultaneously as, for example, … where blogs, twitter, Facebook … may be synchronised. … Yet it is not only the online context where we find this multiplicity, but also the technologies through which it interfaces with our everyday lives. I browse Facebook on the iPad as I sit on the sofa, use my laptop for more keyboard-related activities and then … connect to the public Wi-Fi system to click on a link through my iPhone when I arrive at the municipal library. (Pink, 2012, p. 131)

This account is concerned with precisely those matters of movement and dwelling or of orientation and habitation that fascinate me—with life lived along lines (storylines stitched together with the trails of browsing eyes and fingers, and of walking feet)—and some of Pink’s recent work helps to illustrate the sort of nonrepresentational, non-media-centric media studies that I am advocating (see also Krajina, Moores, & Morley, in press; Moores, in press; Pink & Leder Mackley, 2013).