Once 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.

Les mer

Social media face criticisms about anticompetitive reach, addictive design, and toxicity to democracy, but disconnection practices—restricting, detoxing, deleting—often only reinforce these effects of social media. This book addresses the ambivalence, commodification, and complicity involved in attempts to separate from social media.

Les mer

Introduction: 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 OntologyZeena 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 BrazilMarianna Ferreira Jorge and Julia Salgado

Delaying Disconnection

Overcoming Forced Disconnection: Disentangling the Professional and the Personal in Pandemic TimesChristoffer Bagger and Stine Lomborg

Disconnecting on Two Wheels: Bike touring, leisure and reimagining networksPedro Ferreira and Airi Lampinen

Analogue Nostalgia: Examining Critiques of Social Media
Clara Wieghorst

Les mer

Chapter Downloads:

Reckoning with Social Media Introduction

Reckoning with Social Media Chapter 6

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781538147429
Publisert
2023-09-12
Utgiver
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Vekt
386 gr
Høyde
230 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
19 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
250

Biografisk notat

Aleena Chia is lecturer of media, communications, and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her previous appointments include assistant professor at the School of Communication in Simon Fraser University. She researches cultures of creativity in digital game production, social media disconnection, and Silicon Valley spiritual subcultures. Her work has been published in the Internet Policy Review, Journal of Fandom Studies, Television and New Media, and American Behavioral Scientist.

Ana Jorge is a research coordinator at CICANT and associate professor at Lusófona University. Ana is a Media and Cultural Studies scholar and researches children, youth and media, audiences, celebrity culture, and digital culture. Her scholarship appears in journals such as Celebrity Studies, Social Media and Society, Journal of Children and Media, and European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Tero Karppi is associate professor at the University of Toronto. He teaches at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology and the Faculty of Information. He is the author of Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds (University of Minnesota Press 2018) and his research has been published in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, Social Media + Society, and New Media & Society.