Graziano Lingua, Mauro Carbone, Antropologia degli schermi. Mostrare e nascondere, esporre e proteggere, Roma, Luiss University Press, 2024 (pp. 240)

This review discusses Antropologia degli schermi. Mostrare e nascondere, esporre e proteggere (2024) by Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua. The authors study screens pragmatically, through the relationships and experiences they help to shape. The book combines philosophy, screen studies, image theory and digital media studies to trace how screens have shown, hidden, protected and exposed in different historical and cultural settings. Much of the analysis concerns today’s digital environments. Interfaces and algorithmic systems give an impression of immediacy and transparency, yet they hide the computational processes that make them work. The review follows how care and control become entangled in these environments, with reference to surveillance, generative artificial intelligence and recommendation systems. It then turns to the agency the authors assign to screens, which they treat as quasi-subjects that take part in producing meaning and organising social relations. The last part examines the concept of dividuality, which the book uses to describe how digital interactions split individual identity and multiply it. Reading the volume alongside sociosemiotic approaches, the review argues that Carbone and Lingua offer useful tools for studying how screens are changing social life.