As the global pandemic has shown us, embodied social interactions are a necessity if one is to actively take part in the sociocultural world. Self-isolation, lockdown, curfew, “social distancing”, are all meant to prevent a virus from spreading but they also constitute a risk for people to develop negative affects, solitude and exclusion. Digital devices are therefore regarded as a panacea; they have become a way to interact safely, to fulfill the human desire for ubiquity and to maintain a sense of belonging. However, as safe and intuitive as they may seem, digital screens remain complex and multidimensional devices. They actively take part in shaping human interactions insofar as they carry both possibilities and constraints -affordances- into interindividual communication.

Making use of digital technologies implies developing a “digital literacy”. This notion doesn’t not only refer to technical aspects, but it rather encompasses various cognitive, intercorporeal and socio-affective dimensions. Therefore, it appears crucial to better analyze and define the digital literacy co-enacted in embodied and artifacted social interactions, and to more adequately understand it as a “technobodily literacy”, a multimodal, multisensorial, plurisemiotic and situated practice. A practice through which individuals make use of their digital devices in ways that participate in co-shaping humane technology uses and in fighting exclusion.

To further understand the on- and off-screen display of extimacy and the ways in which individuals interconnect their inner and outer worlds through digital devices and in collaboration with others during the COVID19 pandemic, this project focuses on a specific community of individuals particularly affected by the ongoing restrictions; expatriates in Finland. Young foreigners have most parts of their existing social life abroad and are yet to create a new social network in Finland.

On the one hand, digital devices, allow them to share their immediate world with distant relatives. Indeed, video calls are not to be regarded as simple “talking heads” configurations but they rather constitute, in intimate contexts, ways for oneself to share their surroundings, their ongoing activities, their pets and other third parties, etc. On the other hand, digital devices are ways for them to share their distant world with new acquaintances in their immediate presence. They are indeed used both to reach out to each other through social networks for instance and to show personal elements on smartphones in face to face encounters. In either circumstance, displaying extimacy is always a matter of making visible the invisible through digital devices co-enacting hybrid sociabilities.