The limits and boundaries of digital disconnection (original) (raw)
Related papers
Understanding digital disconnection beyond media studies
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2021
Digital disconnection or 'digital detox' has become a key reference point for media scholars interested in how media technology increasingly gains influence on our everyday lives. Digital disconnection from intrusive media is often intertwined with other types of human conduct, which is less highlighted. There is a potential for media scholars to engage with what seems to be a mainstreaming of digital disconnection from self-help literature via mobile applications to media activism and public debate. In this article, we therefore aim to examine digital disconnection beyond media studies by distilling five common positions: disconnection as health, concentration, existentiality, freedom and sustainability. An underlying theme in all five positions appears to be the notion of responsibilisation, although some of the positions attempt to portray disconnection as a way to ultimately resist such responsibilisation. The article thus aims to spur media scholars to treat digital disconnection as part of broader cultural trends.
Media, Culture & Society
This theoretical intervention puts forward a concept of ‘digital disengagement’ to discuss new socio-cultural, economic and political demarcations and implications surrounding the relationship between digital media, culture and society. At present, despite a proliferation of calls to reduce both the range of digital devices and communication platforms, and the time spent using them, and despite a growing body of academic work on disconnection or opt-out, disengagement from the digital is still conceptualised by media research as a spatiotemporal or an ideological aberration. To challenge this framework, we propose a paradigmatic shift. We invite digital media scholarship to denaturalise the digital by centring digital disengagement both as a complex phenomenon currently unfolding and as a conceptual entry point into thinking about sociality, agency, rights and everyday life more broadly. Mobilising digital disengagement as a theoretical lens, our piece provides the following: first,...
Doubt and Disengagement: Technologies and Practices of Digital Disconnection
2019
When people distrust media systems, one response is to disconnect. This emergent theme within internet research encompasses technologies, practices, discourses, and politics of disconnection. Furthering these discussions, this panel draws together four investigations into technologies and practices of digital disconnection. Each paper interrogates a different form of disconnection and considers the various elements of trust and/or mistrust they reflect. Two of the papers focus on forms of disconnection centered around avoidance. One takes up the problem of digital propaganda and the associated declining trust in online media systems. It argues that informational avoidance in the form of ‘strategic illiteracies’ might open new spaces for resistance to misinformation. The other paper considers the challenge of managing personal availability in a context where mobile communication creates expectations of continual availability. It investigates the discursive practices that young adults...
Observatorio (OBS*) Journal (2024, Vol 18, nº 3), 75-95, 2024
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic being a past, the concern for digital balance remains relevant. Digital devices accompany people constantly, and young users are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of their usage. Considering the problem's relevance,we focus on digital disconnection (DD) among emerging adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a mixed methodology combining two qualitativeapproaches:story completion and the contentanalysis.We identify and systemize barriers and techniques of DD and we answer whether these practices are stable. We present four groups of categories of barriers: obstacles, the functionality of the digital world, the design of the digital world, and the problem' of displacement. We also outline techniques for DD:human-centric actions, temporal solutions, technological support, and activities outside the online world.
Disconnection: Designs and Desires
AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2020
One of the paradoxes of disconnection is that social platforms like Facebook frame it as a threat to our prosperity while critics associated with “the techlash” maintain that quite on the contrary it is the only thing that brings back the possibility for good life. Disconnection means different things for different actors and these differences manifest in varying desires and designs. The five papers in this panel draw on empirical research and media and cultural theory to find answers to questions such as what process have led to the desires to disconnect; how does something disconnect; when does it disconnect; what does it disconnect; and whose disconnection it is? Two of the papers map the choice to disconnect in situations where on one hand digital participation has become structurally necessary by the demands of the society and on the other where users are doing outdoor activities and it is connection that requires activity. Three of the papers focus on particular designs of dis...
The Digital Pandemic: Imagination in Times of Isolation
2022
In dialogue with authors such as Agamben, Žižek, Latour, Byung-Chul Han and Donatella Di Cesare, The Digital Pandemic, translated from Portuguese, argues that the pandemic has not only accelerated but also illuminated the consequences of the digital revolution. Cachopo’s main thesis is that the pandemic is not in itself the event. The event, precipitated by the sudden isolation and the intensified use of digital technologies, is a “disruption of the senses”, a radical transformation, that predates and will survive the outbreak, of how we imagine proximity and distance. Tracing the controversies around mechanical reproduction and digital remediation, from Walter Benjamin to Jay David Bolter and Robert Grusin, the book examines what is ultimately a transformation of the human condition, paying special attention to the experiences of love, travel, study, community and art. Written between 2020 and 2021, this bold theoretical work does not prophesy the fall of capitalism or the end of personal freedom and relationships. Instead, it carefully investigates how advanced technology has become inextricable from our lives, using an alternative approach that avoids technophobia, while remaining alert to the risks and threats of the digital age. Finally, it raises the question as to what it means to foster global solidarity and consciousness beyond physical borders in the 21st century.
Media, Culture & Society, 2020
Using empirical vignettes of repression against minority groups in the Global South, my essay attempts to contribute to the existing discourse in disconnection studies by contextualising and reconceptualising the notion of disconnection in the contemporary milieu. I introduce the term 'dis/connection' into the existing repertoire to illustrate how the interplay between connection and disconnection serves as a tactic and a technique of both repression and resistance. 'Dis/connection as repression' represents a political practice of modern power that is ubiquitous, diffuse and circulating; it captures both territorial and network ecologies, renders the living condition of the targeted community transparent, making them visible to the gaze of the authorities. Against this practice, I identify the possibility of resistance by conceptualising 'dis/connection as resistance' in the form of an assemblage, namely the interplay between connection and disconnection that is formed through a constellation of things, each paving their own pathways but can cohere at certain events or moments before dispersing again. 'Dis/connection assemblage' follows the logic of media hybridity, is built upon temporary aggregates of media artefacts and connects networks and territorialities in multiple spatialities and temporalities. Within the dis/connection assemblage, people may sculpt their spaces and networks of hope for change.
Vinyl Won't Save Us: Reframing Disconnection as Engagement
Media, Culture and Society, 2020
Disconnection has recently come to the forefront of public discussions as an antidote to an increasing saturation with digital technologies. Yet experiences with disconnection are often reduced to a form of disengagement that diminishes their political impact. Disconnective practices focused on health and well-being are easily appropriated by big tech corporations, defusing their transformative potential into the very dynamics of digital capitalism. In contrast, a long tradition of critical thought, from Joseph Weizenbaum to Jaron Lanier passing through hacktivism, demonstrates that engagement with digital technologies is instrumental to develop critique and resistance against the paradoxes of digital societies. Drawing from this tradition, this article proposes the concept of "Disconnection-through-Engagement" to illuminate situated practices that mobilize disconnection in order to improve critical engagement with digital technologies and platforms. Hybridity, anonymity, and hacking are examined as three forms of Disconnection-through-Engagement, and a call to decommodify disconnection and recast it as a source of collective critique to digital capitalism is put forward.
Endless Scrolling: Technology, (Dis)Connection, and Place in Times of COVID-19
2021
The COVID-19 pandemic created sudden ruptures in the ways many people connected with one another in their day to day lives. Though experiences differed, many turned to communication technology as a means to continue to connect despite COVID restrictions. For some this meant learning to collaborate with coworkers through a screen, while for others it allowed for a sense of closeness with those at a great geographical distance. For many, the seemingly separate spheres of the work, home, and social life all began to take place in one physical, and many virtual, spaces. Though it allows for a smoother transition to life at a social distance, communication technology is not always viewed as a positive tool. Researchers have pointed out the damaging effects that social virtual platforms can have on wellbeing, and the capital-driven motives of these virtual spaces translates to design that vies for the continual attention of its users. The question I sought to answer in this research was f...