The limits and boundaries of digital disconnection

Abstract

This editorial introduces a themed section aimed to spark further reflections on the limits and boundaries of disconnection as a form of critique, activism and response to the pervasiveness of digital devices, platforms, and infrastructures. We outline two key limits in current thinking about disconnection: first, the universalist discourse of disconnection, which contrasts with the reality of a profound inequality of access to both connection and disconnection across the globe, and second, the fact that connectivity not only involves digital media users but also those who are materially not connected to the network. This introduction also reflects on the changing meanings of being connected and disconnected to digital networks and platforms at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic forces many people around the world to remain physically separated from others due to lockdown and quarantine measures.

Intensification, discovery and abandonment: Unearthing global ecologies of dis/connection in pandemic times

“…By moving most activities carried out in the physical world into the digital realm, the pandemic has profoundly altered the delicate balance between connective and disconnective practices. The massive acceleration and intensification of digital activities and the abrupt shift to forced forms of over-connection is impacting our wellbeing, our work, our leisure time, the news ecosystem and the meaning of our autonomy contributing to redraw the boundaries and the limits of digital disconnection (Lupton, 2020;Treré et al, 2020). Like few phenomena before, COVID-19 is revealing the scale and severity of online inequalities that our societies face and the profound injustices in relation to the implementations of digital infrastructures and data systems (Sarkar and Korjan, 2021).…”

Locative disconnection: The use of location-based technologies to make disconnection easier, enforceable and exclusive

“…More work is required to properly address questions about users’ rights to be informed regarding what digital services are un/available in certain locations and whether locative disconnection (or particular applications thereof) interferes with the United Nations declarations on the right to Internet access, or ‘freedom to connect’ (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2016). In a similar vein, given the largely universalist discourses that exist around disconnection at present (Treré et al, 2020), simple explorations of the ways that various marginalized groups make sense of locative disconnection would be useful in terms of deepening our understanding of best practice digital inclusion policy, helping to illustrate, for example, what structures or paradigms and specific sociocultural practices are reinforced or subverted by locative disconnection.…”

“…We don’t intend ease, enforceability and exclusivity to be the only action potentials of locative disconnection. Given the need to further reflect on the limits and boundaries of digital disconnection more generally (see Treré et al, 2020), we invite subsequent scholars to identify additional dynamics of locative disconnection as a right, a lifestyle choice and form of governance and underlie the concept as a means to interrogate emerging digital practices and the multitudes of dis/connections that undergird them.…”

Going cold turkey!: An autoethnographic exploration of digital disengagement

“…The recent phenomenon of digital rejection has been captured under different names, such as digital disconnection (Treré et al, 2020), digital detox (Syvertsen, 2020), digital disengagement (Kuntsman & Miyake, 2016;, or unplugging (Morris & Cravens Pickens, 2017). In particular, the concept of digital detox emerged as a popular choice to refer to "a periodic disconnection from social or online media, or strategies to reduce digital media involvement" (Syvertsen & Enli, 2019: 1).…”