Social Media, Interrupted: Users Recounting Temporary Disconnection on Instagram

Abstract

This article looks at the discourses of Instagram users about interrupting the use of social or digital media, through hashtags such as “socialmediadetox,” “offline,” or “disconnecttoreconnect.” We identified three predominant themes: posts announcing or recounting voluntary interruption, mostly as a positive experience associated to regaining control over time, social relationships, and their own well-being; others actively campaigning for this type of disconnection, attempting to convert others; and disconnection as a lifestyle choice, or marketing products by association with disconnection imaginary. These discourses reproduce other public discourses in asserting the self-regulation of the use of social media as a social norm, where social media users are responsible for their well-being and where interruption is conveyed as a valid way to achieve that end. They also reveal how digital disconnection and interruption is increasingly reintegrated on social media as lifestyle, in cynical and ironic ways, and commodified and co-opted by businesses, benefiting from—and ultimately contributing to—the continued economic success of the platform. As Hesselberth, Karppi, or Fish have argued in relation to other forms of disconnection, discourses about Instagram interruptions are thus not transformative but restorative of the informational capitalism social media are part of.

‘Absentmindedly scrolling through nothing’: liveness and compulsory continuous connectedness in social media

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A Preliminary Validation of the Polish Version of the Social Media Fatigue Scale

“… 4 On the other hand, some statistics reveal that 42% of Facebook users in the United States have taken a break from checking the site for several weeks or more and 26% have removed the app from their mobile phones. 5 Moreover, several different studies showed that some users of well-known social media platforms are considering temporary disconnection from Instagram, 6 , 7 Facebook, 6 , 8 WeChat, 9 MySpace, 10 WhatsApp, 11 or Twitter. 12 …”

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“…Hence, disconnection can be reinterpreted as a set of situated practices that do not refuse, but instead, complexify our everyday encounters with digital technologies. In order to do so, we also need to infuse politics onto disconnection (Fish, 2017; Jorge, 2019), decommodifying it and recasting it instead as a critique to digital capitalism. Disconnection could be situated within a broader frame of collective political responsibility aimed at producing social and political change, opening ‘new ways of imagining relations between technologies and freedoms, engagement and digitality and sociality and refusal’ (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2019: 2).…”