Digital Reality: The Body and Digital Technologies

Digital technologies are not just things we look at or operate; they are part of how we sense, move, communicate and experience the world. In Digital Reality: The Body and Digital Technologies, Melanie Chan brings that bodily dimension into focus, considering familiar screen-based activities alongside broader questions about virtual reality, movement and presence.

Drawing on phenomenology and scholarship across several disciplines, Chan offers a thoughtful way to examine how digital life is lived—not as an escape from the body, but as an ongoing relationship between bodies, devices and environments.

Everyday technology, experienced bodily

The book begins by exploring digital reality through phenomenological ideas, then turns to everyday encounters with communication technologies and writing. Messaging, online interaction and digital text become opportunities to ask how sensory experience, attention and meaning are shaped by technologies we use routinely.

Movement, measurement and agency

Later chapters consider movement in relation to digital devices, including self-tracking and the quantification of space and time. Chan examines both the appeal and the limits of turning movement into data, connecting these questions with ideas about agency, bodily knowledge and movement analysis.

Presence in virtual environments

The discussion of virtual reality addresses spatiality, presence, immersion and virtual bodies. Rather than reducing the subject to a question of how convincing a simulation feels, the book places virtual experience in conversation with the body and the world beyond the screen.

A cross-disciplinary perspective

Across its chapters, Digital Reality brings media and communication studies into dialogue with philosophy, sociology, cultural studies and performance and movement studies. It also raises wider issues around surveillance, data mining, knowledge production and the mixed possibilities of self-tracking.

This scholarly work may suit students, researchers and curious readers interested in digital culture, embodiment, media theory or virtual reality. Its central question is both accessible and far-reaching: what changes when digital technologies become part of how we experience being present in the world?