Digital anticipation

This chapter develops and demonstrates a design anthropological approach to the anticipatory modes through which we live with digital technologies and media. In doing so, it expands recent attention to the entanglements of digital living in media phenomenology scholarship. It achieves this through engaging design anthropological concepts of contingency and improvisation on the one hand and trust and anxiety on the other. It creates a dialogue between these sets of concepts and the question of how everyday digital ethics are constituted in practice. In doing so, the chapter draws on extensive qualitative research which followed how the use of digital technologies, platforms and media shifted elements of the practice of child protection social work during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom in 2020.