Description
Book SynopsisOnce celebrated for connecting people and circulating ideas, social media are facing mounting criticisms about their anticompetitive reach, addictive design, and toxicity to democracy. Known cumulatively as the “techlash,” journalists, users, and politicians are asking social media platforms to account for being too big, too engaging, and too unruly. In the age of the techlash, strategies to regulate how platforms operate technically, economically, and legally, are often stacked against individual tactics to manage the effects of social media by disconnecting from them. These disconnection practices—from restricting screen time and detoxing from device use to deleting apps and accounts—often reinforce rather than confront the ways social media organize attention, everyday life, and society.
Reckoning with Social Media challenges the prevailing critique of social media that pits small gestures against big changes, that either celebrates personal transformation or champions structural reformation. This edited volume reframes evaluative claims about disconnection practices as either restorative or reformative of current social media systems by beginning where other studies conclude: the ambivalence, commodification, and complicity of separating from social media.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Reckoning with Social Media in the Pandemic Denouement
Aleena Chia, Ana Jorge, and Tero Karppi
Defining Disconnection
- Why Disconnecting Matters? Towards a Critical Research Agenda on Online Disconnection
Magdalena Kania-Lundholm
- The Ontological Insecurity of Disconnecting: A Theory of Echolocation and the Self
Annette N. Markham
Desiring Disconnection
- ‘Hey! I’m back after a 24h #DigitalDetox!’: Influencers posing disconnection
Ana Jorge and Marco Pedroni
- Privacy, energy, time and moments stolen: Social media experiences pushing towards disconnection
Trine Syvertsen and Brita Ytre-Arne
- Quitting Digital Culture: Rethinking Agency in a Beyond-Choice Ontology
Zeena Feldman
Designing Disconnection
- Ethics and Experimentation in The Light Phone and Google Digital Wellbeing
Aleena Chia and Alex Beattie
- From digital detox to 24/365 disconnection: between dependency tactics and resistance strategies in Brazil
Marianna Ferreira Jorge and Julia Salgado
Delaying Disconnection
- Overcoming Forced Disconnection: Disentangling the Professional and the Personal in Pandemic Times
Christoffer Bagger and Stine Lomborg
- Disconnecting on Two Wheels: Bike touring, leisure and reimagining networks
Pedro Ferreira and Airi Lampinen
- Analogue Nostalgia: Examining Critiques of Social Media
Clara Wieghorst
