Description
Digital networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have revolutionized everyday human interaction by facilitating the search for, and access to, information, entertainment, and social connection. But with the rise of digital surveillance and data extraction for profit, more people are seeking not just to disconnect from technology but to fully disentangle themselves from the widespread social, economic, and political networks of digital communications.Disentangling offers an interdisciplinary global analysis of this growing trend toward disconnection. Moving beyond technological disconnection, this volume proposes the term "disentangling" as a lens for re-thinking the structures of our digital world and categorizing the ways in which people reject, avoid, or rework their digital networks. Across twelve chapters, contributors explore the existential issues stemming from digitally entangled lives, including cultural capital and digital "detox" retreats, and investigate how geographies of disconnection relate to wider societal challenges. Additional chapters explore connections between digital disconnection and other forms of disconnection, including death, sleep, and the abandonment of human settlements. The volume closes with a reflection on connectivity in the post-pandemic society and how we might rework our connections to fit a "socially distanced" world.Blending philosophy and sociology with media geography, Disentangling offers a crucial reflection on how we might unravel our digital dependence by reasserting resilient boundaries between ourselves and the surrounding political, economic, cultural, and technological systems.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsContributor ListIntroduction: Rethinking the Disentangling Force of Connective MediaPaul C. Adams and André Jansson Part I: Power Geometries of ConnectivityChapter 1: Disconnection and Reconnection as Resistance to GeosurveillanceDavid SwanlundChapter 2: Locational Technologies in Post-disaster Infrastructure Space: Uneven Access to OpenStreetMap in Post-earthquake HaitiMimi ShellerChapter 3: Disconnection as Distinction: A Bourdieusian Study of Where People Withdraw from Digital MediaKarin Fast, Johan Lindell, and André JanssonChapter 4: Digital Disconnection as Othering: Immersion, 'Authenticity,' and the Politics of ExperienceNeriko Musha DoerrPart II: (Dis)connected LivesChapter 5: Automating Digital AfterlivesRobbie Fordyce, Bjorn Nansen, Michael Arnold, Tamara Kohn, and Martin Gibbs Chapter 6: Senses and Sensors of Sleep: Mediation and Disconnection in Sleep ArchitecturesBjorn Nansen, Kate Mannell, and Christopher O'NeillChapter 7: Digital Ruins: Virtual Worlds as Landscapes of DisconnectionGonzalo C. Garcia and Vincent Miller Chapter 8: 'Think on Paper, Share Online': Interrogating the Sense of Slowness and Disconnection in the Rise of Shouzhang in ChinaYan YuanPart III: Rethinking Disconnection in a Disrupted WorldChapter 9: Disconnect to Reconnect! Self-help to Regain an Authentic Sense of Space through Digital DetoxingGunn Enli and Trine SyvertsenChapter 10: Retreat Culture and Therapeutic DisconnectionPepita HesselberthChapter 11: Networked Intimacies: Pandemic Dis/Connections between Anxiety, Joy, and PleasureJenny SundénChapter 12: Paradoxes of Disconnected ConnectionPaul C. Adams, Vivie Behrens, Steven Hoelscher, Olga Lavrenova, Heath Robinson, and Yan YuanIndex
