The paradox and continuum of digital disengagement: denaturalising digital sociality and technological connectivity

Abstract

This theoretical intervention puts forward a concept of ‘digital disengagement’ to discuss new socio-cultural, economic and political demarcations and implications surrounding the relationship between digital media, culture and society. At present, despite a proliferation of calls to reduce both the range of digital devices and communication platforms, and the time spent using them, and despite a growing body of academic work on disconnection or opt-out, disengagement from the digital is still conceptualised by media research as a spatiotemporal or an ideological aberration. To challenge this framework, we propose a paradigmatic shift. We invite digital media scholarship to denaturalise the digital by centring digital disengagement both as a complex phenomenon currently unfolding and as a conceptual entry point into thinking about sociality, agency, rights and everyday life more broadly. Mobilising digital disengagement as a theoretical lens, our piece provides the following: first, we critically assess the prevalent conflation of digitality with social networking, which leads to a limited understanding of disengagement as being only about disconnecting from social media platforms. Second, we challenge the normalisation of the technological in practices of disconnection, arguing instead that disengagement might be structured, but should not be determined, by the technological. Third, we demonstrate that digital disengagement is not a single phenomenon but a complex continuum of practices, motivations and effects. Understood as such, it has the potential to open new ways of imagining relations between technologies and freedoms, engagement and digitality and sociality and refusal.

Vinyl won’t save us: reframing disconnection as engagement

“…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). This also means imagining more effective forms of collective disconnection and refusal that counteract the individualistic, atomized nature of the neoliberal society.…”

“…The first example is related to the role-played by disconnective practices within contemporary forms of hybrid media activism (Treré, 2019). While most of the literature on both digital activism (Kaun and Treré, 2018; Treré, 2019) and disconnection (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2019) have tended to overtly focus on social media, many recent manifestations of activism are hybrid, encompassing and merging old and new media, and spreading across a wide spectrum of digital and analogue technologies (Chadwick, 2017). Activists from movements such as the Spanish Indignados, Occupy Wall Street, #YoSoy132 and the Arab Spring are vivid examples not just of digitally connected protesters, but also of selectively disconnected-engaged activists.…”

“…Increasingly, educational facilities are banning or limiting digital technologies and Wi-Fi in class, detox tours are organised in remote locations where people momentarily abandon their smartphones, and a new wave of digital activism advocates for data detox to raise awareness regarding the threats that social media pose to our privacy and freedom (Karppi, 2018). Diverse domains of society are developing initiatives focused on the need to disconnect, pushing us ‘to rethink the conceptual normalization of the digital’ in our lives (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2019: 2). In sum, we are living in the ‘disconnection momentum’, a particular historical phase where the perception of the saturation with digital technology has reached a climax.…”

Nothing to disconnect from? Being singular plural in an age of machine learning

“…These studies variously conceptualise disconnection as resistance to surveillance (Light, 2014), as lifestyle politics (Portwood-Stacer, 2013), as a path to liberation and control (Wyatt et al, 2002) and as an everyday phenomenon spanning different motivations and modalities, including distrust in media, personal choice, activism and impression management (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2019; Syvertsen, 2017). While research on digital disconnection differs in the terms used to describe the phenomenon, what they have in common is a conviction that disconnection is not just possible but also meaningful and necessary.…”

Re-thinking Digital Health: Data, Appisation and the (im)possibility of ‘Opting out’

“…Combining our expertise in digital sociology, cultural studies, digital health, computation and data visualisation, this article aims to make two key contributions to simultaneously advance critical debates in the field of ‘critical digital health studies’ and to inform future research around digitised healthcare. The first contribution lies in our proposed paradigmatic shift from engagement to dis-engagement as a starting point for discussing health appisation (for a broader discussion of ‘digital disengagement’ as a shift in media studies, see Kuntsman and Miyake 16 ). Current research into digital health, including critical scholarship, 5,17–20 still largely prioritises engagement with digital technologies.…”