Pets and Digital Media in Everyday Life investigates relations of play and care emerging at the intersection of pets, humans and digital media practices in the home.

While research has studied animals in the home, Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson expand this thinking to incorporate the embedded role of digital media in human-pet relations. This book asks: How do our digital cultures reflect human-pet embodied communication, and empathy? And how can these entangled human-pet stories teach us different ways of not just researching digital media in domestic spaces, but also, more expansively, about our being in the world? Each chapter seeks to bring new insights to the topic, by exploring the deep sensory and social affinities we share with our pets, and how digital media is an embedded part of this meaning making process.

Grounded in cultural and digital media studies, this book is highly relevant for students and scholars of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies, particularly those exploring pets, digital media practices, and social media in everyday life.

Larissa Hjorth is Distinguished Professor in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University, Australia. A digital ethnographer, socially-engaged artist, and ARC Future Fellow, she has almost three decades of experience in mobile media research and has published extensively on intergenerational connection, intimacy, play, ageing, loss and death in digital contexts. Books include Ambient Play (2020 with Richardson), Mourning on Mobile Media (2025), and The Digital Life of Grief (2026, ed with Gerber and Abidin) to name a few.

Ingrid Richardson is Professor of Digital Media in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Australia. She has been teaching, supervising and researching in the fields of digital media, mobile media and games for over twenty years. She is co-author of Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media (2014), Ambient Play (2020), Understanding Games and Game Cultures (2020), Exploring Minecraft: Ethnographies of Play and Creativity (2021), and Bodies and Mobile Media (2023).