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. Wrongly, communication is often seen as a simple transfer of information. It contains, in fact, much more, insofar as we also communicate to “build relationships, share emotions and feelings, act on others, seduce or attack, reinforce our identity or that of others” (Lipiansky, 1993). Furthermore, social interactions are to be regarded as body-to-body interactions by nature (Cosnier, 2004). The intercorporeal aspect of human interactions is visible through multimodality (verbal utterances, gestures, facial expressions, gazes, body postures, movements, spatial arrangements, manipulations of objects, etc.), multisensoriality (individuals “sensorially engage in the material world, using multimodal resources not only to communicate or make their interactions accountable but also to express, manifest, and display their sensory access to the world” (Mondada, 2019), and multiactivity (within social interactions “different trajectories of action are temporally coexisting, intertwining, and mutually shaping each other”(Ibid.)).

Furthermore, digital technologies provide interactants with more and more resources to express themselves and to find their voice and place in this ever-changing world. The physical, relational, emotional and aesthetic existence of Humans is henceforth deeply involved in technical interaction devices (Lévy, 2013). And digital medias open a wide range of audiovisual resources (images, videos, gifs, emojis, hyperlinks, hashtags, etc.) available to and shaped by individuals, introducing plurisemioticity in social interactions (Paveau, 2013). Those digital resources allow interactants to show extimacy - “the movement that repositions some elements of our intimate lives into the public domain so as to have a feedback as to their value” (Tisseron, 2011). The use of technologies to display one’s inner world to others and to interconnect it to the outer world emerges from the fact that “we increasingly define our identity as what we can exhibit and what others can see. Intimacy is so important to define ourselves that we have to show it. It confirms our very existence.” (Pérez-Lanzac et al., 2009).

With the 2020 global pandemic, digital devices are regarded as a panacea; they have become a way to interact safely, to fulfill the “human desire for ubiquity” (Gras, 1999) and to maintain a “sense of belonging” (Lipiansky, 1993). Screens seem to form a compromise allowing individuals to follow physical distancing rules without withdrawing from social life. 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” (Lamy, 2010) into interindividual communication. Making use of digital technologies, regarded here as a partner acting in a relationship as empowering as it is constraining (Voirol, 2013), 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 (Eshet, 2004). 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.