Disentangling
The Geographies of Digital Disconnection
Edited by André Jansson and Paul C. Adams
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197571873.001.0001
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Acknowledgments vii
Editors ix
Contributors xi
Introduction: Rethinking the Entangling Force of Connective Media 1
Paul C. Adams and André Jansson
PART I: POWER GEOMETRIES OF CONNECTIVITY
1. Disconnection and Reconnection as Resistance to Geosurveillance 23 David Swanlund
2. Locational Technologies in Post-disaster Infrastructure Space: Uneven Access to OpenStreetMap in Postearthquake Haiti 41
Mimi Sheller
3. Disconnection as Distinction: A Bourdieusian Study of Where People Withdraw from Digital Media 61 Karin Fast, Johan Lindell, and André Jansson
4. Digital Disconnection as Othering: Immersion, “Authenticity” and the Politics of Experience 91 Neriko Musha Doerr
PART II: (DIS)CONNECTED LIVES
5. Automating Digital Afterlives 115 Robbie Fordyce, Bjørn Nansen, Michael Arnold, Tamara Kohn, and Martin Gibbs
6. Senses and Sensors of Sleep: Digital Mediation and Disconnection in Sleep Architectures 137
Bjørn Nansen, Kate Mannell, and Christopher O’Neill
7. Digital Ruins: Virtual Worlds as Landscapes of Disconnection 163
Gonzalo C. Garcia and Vincent Miller
8. “Think on Paper, Share Online”: Interrogating the Sense of Slowness and Disconnection in the Rise of Shouzhang in China
189 Yan Yuan
PART III: RETHINKING DISCONNECTION IN A DISRUPTED WORLD
9. Disconnect to Reconnect! Self-help to Regain an Authentic Sense of Space Through Digital Detoxing
Gunn Enli and Trine Syvertsen
227
10. Retreat Culture and Therapeutic Disconnection 253
Pepita Hesselberth
11. Networked Intimacies: Pandemic Dis/Connections Between Anxiety, Joy, and Laughter 273 Jenny Sundén
12. Paradoxes of Disconnected Connection
295 Paul C. Adams, Vivie Behrens, Steven Hoelscher, Olga Lavrenova, Heath Robinson, and Yan Yuan
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of several years of deliberation on digital disconnection or, as we eventually came to call it, disentangling. We started with a shared interest in studying how, why, where, and when people are able to get away from things like e-mail and Skype. However, we relied on those digital technologies to stay in touch despite living some 8000 km (5000 mi) apart. This sort of long-distance collaboration hardly merits attention at this point—a fact that indicates how far so many of us have come over the past several decades in normalizing long-distance work routines and socializing. Still, Skype calls and e-mail only maintained the impetus brought to this project by our opportunities to travel abroad for a mix of collaboration and sightseeing. Paul got to visit the retreat where André unraveled digital entanglements, and André got to visit the retreat where Paul unraveled digital entanglements. These places, where each of us felt connected to the slow rhythms of life—more in touch with material objects, animals, and the weather—played a role in prompting us to reflect on what we meant by disentangling and the limits of this endeavor.
André is grateful for the seed funding he received in 2019 from the Geomedia Research Group for traveling to the United States and developing trans-Atlantic collaborations, of which this book is one of the outcomes.
Paul benefited from funding by the Anne-Marie and Gustaf Ander Foundation for Media Research which allowed him to visit Karlstad University as Ander Visiting Professor in Global Media Studies from 2016 to 2017, as well as a Supplemental College Research Fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. This research visit planted the seeds for the project.
Both authors also wish to express their appreciation for the interest and support of Oxford University Press, particularly Sarah Humphreville whose initial visit in Austin helped get this project going. It seems odd to thank a pandemic, but it must be admitted that COVID-19 did serve as a cattle-prod to make us painfully aware of certain things that made it into this book.
André wants to thank Karin for making everyday companionship so exciting, even during the current period of social enclosure, liquid home offices, and remodeled logistics.
Paul is grateful, as always, to Karina for putting up with him when his head is in the clouds, which is always the case when working on a project like this. Paul is also grateful to his brother, Steve, for helping make his writing retreat a bit more habitable.
Austin, Texas, USA, April 2021
Karlstad, Sweden, April 2021
Editors
André Jansson is Professor of Media and Communication Studies and Director of the Geomedia Research Group at Karlstad University, Sweden. His most recent books are Transmedia Work: Privilege and Precariousness in Digital Modernity (with Karin Fast, Routledge, 2019) and Mediatization and Mobile Lives: A Critical Approach (Routledge, 2018).
Paul C. Adams is Professor of Geography at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Geographies of Media and Communication (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), co-author of Communications/Media/Geographies (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor of the Research Companion to Media Geography (Ashgate, 2014).
Contributors
Michael Arnold is Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science Program in the Arts Faculty at the University of Melbourne. His research lies at the intersection of technology and contemporary life.
Vivie Behrens graduated with highest honors from the University of Texas at Austin, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities. Behrens works at the intersection of visual art, American studies, media studies, transnational feminist theory, photography, and public humanities.
Neriko Musha Doerr received a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Cornell University. She currently teaches at Ramapo College in New Jersey, USA, and does research on politics of difference, language and power, and education including study abroad and civic engagement in Japan, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the United States.
Gunn Enli is Professor of Media Studies, University of Oslo. Enli’s books include The Media Welfare State (2014), Mediated Authenticity (2015), and Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016). She participates in the project Intrusive Media, Ambivalent Users and Digital Detox (Digitox) from 2019 to 2023.
Karin Fast is Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden, but during 2020 to 2021 holds a fulltime research position at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Transmedia Work: Privilege and Precariousness in Digital Modernity (with André Jansson, 2019).
Robbie Fordyce is Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University. His research focuses on the rules and exploits of digital systems and platforms.
Gonzalo C. Garcia is a novelist and Creative Writing Lecturer at the University of Warwick. His recent novel, We Are the End, is heavily influenced by his interest in video games, digital culture, and everyday constructions of narrative.
Martin Gibbs is Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. He is the coauthor of the recent books Death and Digital Media (2018) and Digital Domesticities (2020).
Contributors
Pepita Hesselberth is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Culture at the Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden University and the Director of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA).
Steven Hoelscher is Professor of American Studies and Geography, Faculty Curator of Photography at the Harry Ransom Center, and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Hoelscher’s research interests include the history of photography, race and racism, North American and European urbanism, social constructions of space and place, and cultural memory.
Tamara Kohn is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Recent co-authored books include Death and Digital Media (2018), Residues of Death: Disposal Refigured (2019), and Sounding Out Japan: An Ethnographic Tour (2020).
Olga Lavrenova is Leading Researcher at the Institute of Scientific Information on Human Science (INION) RAS, Professor of MISIS and GITR (Moscow, Russia) as well as honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts, and President of the International Association for Semiotic of Space and Time (https://www.ias-st.com). She is the author of Spaces and Meanings: Semantics of the Cultural Landscape (2019) and the long-term interdisciplinary project The Geography of Art
Johan Lindell is Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Kate Mannell recently completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne on how young adults negotiate their social availability via mobile messaging. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Mobile Media and Communication, and Platform: Journal of Media and Communication.
Vincent Miller is Reader in Sociology and Cultural Studies at the University of Kent. He has recently published two books on the digital: Understanding Digital Culture (Second Edition, 2020) and The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture (2015), both with SAGE Publications.
Bjørn Nansen is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne; his research focuses on emerging forms of digital media use in everyday life. He is the author of Young Children and Mobile Media (2020) and co-author of Death and Digital Media (2018) and Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality and Home Life (2020).
Christopher O’Neill has recently completed a PhD thesis at the University of Melbourne on the genealogy of biosensors in the fields of medicine, labor, and the home. His work has appeared in New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, and First Monday, and he has served as Editor in Chief of Platform: Journal of Media and Communication.
Heath Robinson is a doctoral candidate working in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focus includes social studies education, pre-service teacher preparation, teacher identity, curriculum studies, and cultural memory.
Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology, Head of the Sociology Department, and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities and author or co-editor of 12 books, including most recently Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (2020) and Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (2018).
Jenny Sundén is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. Her work is situated in the intersection of digital media studies, feminist and queer theory, and affect theory.
David Swanlund is PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University studying location privacy and GIScience.
Trine Syvertsen is Professor of Media Studies, University of Oslo. Syvertsen’s books include The Media Welfare State (2014); Media Resistance; Protest, Dislike, Abstention (2017); and Digital Detox: The Politics of Disconnecting (2020). She chairs the project Intrusive Media, Ambivalent Users and Digital Detox (Digitox) from 2019 to 2023.
Yan Yuan is Professor in Journalism and Communication School at the Huazhong University. She initiated a Media Geography course in China, with research interest covering Media Geography and Media Culture.
Introduction
Rethinking the Entangling Force of Connective Media
Paul C. Adams and André Jansson
Introduction
Digital connectivity platforms are designed to encourage dependence. Marketed as convenient solutions to virtually every spatial and temporal challenge, from purchasing plane tickets to reserving a table at a restaurant, from keeping in touch with friends to learning about world events, from monitoring one’s exercise regime to navigating unfamiliar urban environments, connective media have become ubiquitous, and seemingly indispensable. They take us, as van Dijck (2013) notes, into an era of “platformed sociality,” where our desires are measured, predicted, and reproduced through the operation of algorithms. Facilitating the search for information, entertainment, and social connections, this custom-tailoring of the media landscape appears to multiply the apparent usefulness and convenience of media in general. But its value-added comes from the ability to measure and steer, or stream, digital subjects and their engagements (as data) in the ways that are most profitable (e.g., Pigni et al., 2016; Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Karppi, 2018; Bernard, 2019; Goriunova, 2019). Thus, as Couldry (2017) puts it, our everyday tools are now working upon us, and the media landscape has become not just customized but deeply entangling.
This digital entanglement takes communication into new territory. It prompts a (re)turn to questions of disconnection as a right (Hesselberth, 2017), as a way of shaping experience, as a statement, as a reaction to confrontation or overload, as a response to changes in one’s life, or even as an optional event after one’s death. In response to the digital connectivity regime, trends in society prescribe or assist in various forms of media abstention.
Paul C. Adams and André Jansson, Introduction In: Disentangling. Edited by: André Jansson and Paul C. Adams, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197571873.003.0001
Self-help books have appeared with titles like Digital Minimalism, How to Break Up with Your Phone; and Slow Media, addressing those who hope to reclaim their independence from digital media or rebuild a more “mindful” lifestyle (Newport, 2019; Price, 2018; Rauch, 2018). Organized retreats are proliferating, with custom-tailored forms of “digital detox tourism” for those who seek to push back the forces of connection and carve out a space for unmediated existence (e.g., Fish, 2017; Syvertsen & Enli, 2019). While people’s efforts to disentangle themselves from digital ties may be psychologically, economically, or spiritually motivated, they all converge around the desire to lead a more autonomous life, anchoring oneself, one’s awareness, and one’s actions in the here and now.
In this context, there is a need for geographers to reflect on the dialectics of digital connection and disconnection. They could consider digital disconnection to be a form of resistance to social phenomena that geographers have investigated, such as “digital geographies” (Ash et al., 2018), “geosurveillance” (Crampton, 2007; Swanlund & Schuurman, 2016, 2019), and “data doubles” (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000; Amoore, 2011), as well as concepts from outside of geography such as mediatized “spatial selves” (Schwartz & Hallegoua, 2015). However, although geographers have analyzed “digital divides” that characterize involuntary disconnection from digital media (e.g., Warf, 2001), and have considered ways in which daily life is “reterritorialized” by digital media (Wilson, 2018: 12), little work has been done to understand where people deliberately disconnect from digital media and how practices of digital disconnection carve out their own sorts of places.
Questions about how and why people disconnect have been discussed to a greater degree within media studies, as has the question of whether “disconnection” is even possible; this work has been driven largely by concern over the rise of social media and “smart” devices (e.g., Light & Cassidy, 2014; Karppi, 2018; Jorge, 2019; Bucher, 2020). Media scholars have interpreted voluntary digital disconnection as a recent expression of a recurring trend toward media resistance or rejection (e.g., Syvertsen, 2017; Kaun & Treré, 2018; Syvertsen & Enli, 2019), and have depicted disconnection, brokenness, and failure as inextricable aspects of connectivity (e.g., Paasonen, 2015; Sundén, 2018). This has taken media theory beyond simplified dualistic notions of connection/disconnection to a broader existential terrain (Lagerkvist, 2017, 2018; Karppi, 2018; Kuntsman & Miyake, 2019). However,
this work is still lacking in subtlety and depth when considering the spatial, environmental, or geographical implications of disconnection strategies.
Disconnection is a research topic that will, we believe, define social science in the 2020s, the way networking has in the 2000s and 2010s. Therefore, this edited volume is designed as an inherently interdisciplinary venture. It examines both wanted and unwanted forms of disconnection, with attention to the ways in which places and spaces are increasingly structured by different degrees and types of connectivity, as well as to peculiar ways of facilitating disconnection. The project ultimately rethinks how boundaries of place respond to digital flows and how they are (re)drawn in relation to digitalized environments. We have thus solicited chapter submissions consisting of original research that addresses various aspects of what we would call the geographies of digital disconnection and relates disconnection to the wider challenges of society today. Should we, for example, think of being disconnected as exclusion (something bad) or seclusion (something potentially good), or a mix of both? Digital divides evolve quickly and involve many unexamined variations in access to technology, social norms, and practical knowledge, but what are these variations and how do they work? Both voluntary and involuntary disconnection can result when people reassert place boundaries to exclude unwanted chatter or seclude themselves from unruly technologies. What are these practices, where are they enacted, and why? How do such practices, and cultural constructions of them, reveal different social and cultural positions as well as the intersectionality between these positions?
An important theme that binds together the chapters of the book is that “voluntary” and “involuntary” aspects of disconnection need to be considered in tandem. They are interrelated aspects of the uneven diffusion and socially entangled geographies of communication technology. This, in turn, underscores the premise that digital connection/disconnection is an ambiguous and socially contested terrain where one side may entail, precondition and/or pre-mediate the other. As Sundén states in her contribution to this volume (p. 277), “disconnection is something that lives within every connection [ . . . ] networks and connections are bound to fail, reception can be patchy, devices might break or glitch, run out of power, or be left behind.” The flipside to Sundén’s argument that connection entails disconnection has been raised in recent literature on voluntary disconnection. Fish (2017), for example, describes the function of digital detox camps merely as a way of
lubricating the machinery of digital capitalism. Similarly, Jorge (2019: 1) concludes in her study of how people motivate their disconnection from Instagram that such actions often take the shape of temporary interruptions, and “are thus not transformative but restorative of the informational capitalism social media are part of.” As such, people’s attempts to disconnect or create alternative networks seem futile in a society where connectivity industries such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon colonize our entire lives down to our most mundane and intimate undertakings (see, e.g., Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Karppi, 2018; Andrejevic, 2019; Couldry & Mejias, 2019). Even the photos taken of oneself and loved ones while disconnecting are shared with Facebook “friends” as soon as connectivity is reestablished.
In this opening chapter, we provide a map of this complex terrain. Bringing together key arguments from the contributing chapters, we weave an argument that also represents an agenda for research into the geographies of digital disconnection. Accordingly, the following discussions match the triadic structure of the book. We begin with the increasingly pressing questions of ethics and justice, or what we with Massey (1991) call power geometries, framing digital (dis)connection today (Part I). We then explore existential issues stemming from digitally entangled lives, where disconnection seems an increasingly futile undertaking even in “analog” settings or in one’s afterlife (Part II). Third, we reflect on how ambiguities of (dis)connection are accentuated and exposed in time-spaces of social disruption—as evidenced not least during the COVID-19 pandemic (Part III).
These discussions lead up to a concluding section, in which we propose disentangling as a complementary term to disconnection, contextualizing issues of (dis)connection from a social and spatial perspective. Disentangling implies something more than just disconnection, since the latter is often furtive, escapist, or periodic. Disentangling is about the reassertion of resilient boundaries between the individual life and larger political, economic, cultural, and technological systems. While deliberate disconnection sometimes articulates a “longing for place,” and ambitious measures taken to satisfy this longing, such ambitions also escalate our awareness of, and frustrations with, how deeply our existences today are entangled with digital media. Such entanglements can best be understood as technologically distributed (and automated) agency permeating our entire lives. Even as disconnecting subjects who intend to reconnect to something non-digital (for example real place, nature, others, or, simply
life), we bring our entanglements with us regardless of what kind of place we retreat into.
Power Geometries of Connectivity
Generally, disconnection evokes negative connotations. To be disconnected means that you are cut off from something, no longer capable of staying in touch with your loved ones or accessing your information sources. This, in turn, points to a subordinated position of some kind: marginalization, lack of infrastructure, communication failure. Yet, we increasingly encounter discourses that celebrate digital disconnection as a form of empowerment. To actively disconnect is to regain control over one’s life: resisting the surveillance and exploitative power of connective media, avoiding information stress and reconnecting with one’s inner self and the relations one values the most. Digital connectivity has become an issue that cuts both ways in regard to struggles for justice and debates about ethics. Who should have the right to which types of connection? Should there also be a right to disconnect? What kinds of judgments are involved in our decisions to connect or disconnect under different circumstances, and what does this say about the place of the “disconnected” in segments of society?
We can with Doreen Massey (1991) say that connectivity—in itself harboring the balance between connection and disconnection—constitutes an increasingly important, and complex, type of power geometry in society. Massey coined the term to capture how different groups and individuals are unequally positioned in relation to various resources of mobility and connectivity and how such positionalities (re)produce social power relations at large. What is interesting to see, then, is that social power and status can no longer be unequivocally associated with the possession of what Elliot and Urry (2010) call network capital (including, for example, communication devices, means and documents of travel, and access to safe and secure meeting places). On top of power geometries stemming from unequal infrastructural resources, there are increasingly fine-grained distinctions emerging, especially among those who already have an abundance of such resources and take their network capital more or less for granted. Such distinctions concern how connectivity is handled, including where and when we ought to disconnect. The individual capacity to manage connectivity in day-to-day life,
and the power associated with this capacity, can be likened with Kaufmann’s (2002) idea of motility: the ability to take control over one’s mobility, including the right and privilege to stay put.
In the first part of the book, we have gathered four chapters that illuminate different aspects of these changing power geometries of connectivity. In Chapter 1, David Swanlund discusses the ubiquity of commercial geosurveillance in everyday life, asking whether there is actually any way of resisting such monitoring processes without disconnecting from digital platforms altogether. Geosurveillance refers to the automated collation of spatial data by and through location-based services, typically linked to social media, which can be seen as a threat to individual privacy. Here, Swanlund stresses the need to move beyond simplified, binary oppositions between privacy vs. surveillance and connection vs. disconnection. He thus singles out minimization as well as reconnection as available tactics against the industry’s “hunger for data.” Minimization is a matter of acknowledging the small steps involved in disconnection that eventually lead to enlarged breathing space: “closing extraneous online accounts, using cash when making purchases, not providing a zip code or rewards card at the grocery store, opting out of software analytics, and denying unnecessary permissions to smartphone apps” (p. 33). Reconnection, in turn, entails “forging, strengthening, and altering connections to favor privacy over geosurveillance” (p. 34) through, for example, appropriating alternative apps and software that obfuscate dominant forms data collection and collation. In all, while Swanlund’s mapping of the everyday terrain of geosurveillance presents some hope to those concerned with human autonomy it also underlines the new power differentials linked to connectivity skills and reflexivity.
In the following chapter (Chapter 2), Mimi Sheller provides evidence of similar everyday negotiations, but from a starkly different context. From 2010 to 2013, Sheller studied the implementation of digital infrastructure in post-earthquake recovery processes in Haiti. Even under such conditions, where new geomedia platforms like OpenStreetMap were implemented by international organizations to sustain humanitarian aid projects, the consequences of (re-)connectivity were ambiguous. While the distribution of connectivity and other elements of network capital were uneven from the start, especially since local infrastructures had been demolished, the implementation of new platforms further exposed the uneven nature of global power geometries. Sheller shows that many people “on the ground” were bypassed
by new infrastructure and had to put considerable labor into “patching” together mended infrastructure. Sometimes, they also chose to “strategically disconnect” from new infrastructure “to counter the power of those with high network capital” (p. 43). Disconnection thus unfolded both as an inherent part of infrastructural connectivity efforts and through everyday tactical measures between differently positioned groups. This shows how (partial) disconnection may sometimes constitute an asset, a form of agency, even among socially disadvantaged groups—which is, of course, not to say that disconnection in general, and in the long run, would be a sustainable path to justice and equality.
The next two chapters delve into the current significance of digital disconnection as a form of social privilege, or, cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1979,1984). In Chapter 3, Fast, Lindell, and Jansson provide a survey analysis of where different social groups prefer to disconnect from digital media technology. In Chapter 4, Neriko Musha Doerr brings together three qualitative studies of how digital connectivity was managed under alternative student trips to foreign locations and natural environments. The backdrop to both chapters is the expanding disconnection discourse presenting media discipline and abstention as pathways to well-being, autonomy, and stronger attachment to the “here and now.”
Along these lines, Fast and colleagues demonstrate that experiences of “digital unease”—including information stress, “fear of missing out,” and feelings of digital over-use—are associated with cultural capital and that individual routines for managing connectivity are more common among people in more privileged social positions, and that as a consequence, these groups are more inclined than others to disconnect at certain places, such as in the bedroom, at restaurants, while on vacation or visiting friends, and in nature. Disconnection practices thus manifest ethical standards that tend to distinguish more “cultured” groups from “others.” Doerr takes these discussions further. Based on her analyses of how students handled and conversed about connective media while on study abroad trips and alternative spring break trips to educational farms and wilderness camps, Doerr concludes that disconnection in these settings was invoked as a dominant social norm. It was taken as a prerequisite for gaining the “authentic” experience of local lives and the beauty of nature. Participants who did not adhere to this spatial coding were seen as inferior or suspect. Doerr argues that the disconnection discourse fosters a double othering effect where those who fail to recognize
the constructed value of selective disconnection (related to the quest for “authentic” experiences), as well as people who are involuntarily disconnected, are looked down upon.
This group of chapters highlights the growing levels of reflexivity involved in the day-to-day management of connectivity, whether we speak of “patching” of fragmented connections or distinctive acts of selective media withdrawal. Ultimately, these practices are political in nature. They make up and manifest the power geometries and spatial codes we live by, that is, how we interpret and judge the social and material landscape. Our ability to manage connectivity (connection vs. disconnection) has an impact on our sense of belonging and our feelings about different places. It also affects how others perceive us at different times and places. As such, power geometries of connectivity concern more than network capital and digital access. They concern the deeper existential bonds we have to place and how these bonds are negotiated. While politicians and other power fractions have few incentives to plead for disconnection or infrastructural restrictions—removing things like fiber expansion and 5G development from the agenda would seem very odd indeed—the more digitally entangled we are the more difficult it gets to establish that “breathing space” of privacy that Swanlund talks about, and therefore the more exclusive and privileged such “disconnection retreats” will be. Today, even our innermost lived spaces are technologized and, as such, exposed to ideological, commercial, and other entangling forces.
(Dis)connected Lives
The switch from connection to disconnection has been evident throughout history, for example in sleep, in the abandonment of human settlements, and in death. Social connections are broken when one crawls off to bed, leaves the scene, or dies. Our attempts to give meaning to disconnection are therefore not only key among things that make us human, but they are what could be called existential forms of disconnection—aspects of the human condition. In the digital era, these existential turning points imply new ways of connecting, as well; death is not what it used to be, nor is sleep, nor is the act of departing and leaving behind what one has built. Digital entanglement makes each of these separations into something equivocal, enigmatic, and persistently entangled.
To start with death (perhaps as a bit of a provocation), funeral customs are ancient and socially sanctioned healing processes. When death severs the social fabric, the living do not simply endure disconnection but follow customs to heal the wound, and it is a wound that seldom heals quickly or easily. Death has always led to a disconcerting alternation between attempted reconnection (imagining what someone would say) and repeated encounters with the intransigent fact of disconnection (remembering that they can no longer speak), which in turn motivate not just funeral rituals but peculiar forms of communication. For example, 19th-century mourners dressed up their dead and posed with them in photos creating visual evidence of an enduring social connection, in a way that now strikes us as macabre (Bell, 2016). Older yet is the gesture of reconnecting with the dead by visiting a gravesite or monument and leaving flowers or other offerings as a “gift of presence” to those who are absent (Richardson, 2001), performing the act of giving as proof of an unbroken connection, though the senses (normally) show no evidence of a reply. The fact that we now live in and through data streams intersects with such communication efforts and transforms them. The dead are not merely preserved as visual facsimiles or embedded in an economy of gift-giving, but rather they are extended and simulated in digital form, kept alive as digital agents (Lagerkvist, 2017: 103–104). Insofar as people develop online personas during life, these “second selves” (Turkle, 2005) are easily repurposed as components of a postmortem presence. As Fordyce, Nansen, Arnold, Kohn, and Gibbs demonstrate in this volume (Chapter 5), digital media and computers afford several distinct methods of doing this: prewritten messages sent at intervals after one’s death, surrogates who maintain another person’s online presence, algorithms that post a remixed version of the dead person’s responses, and artificial intelligences that seem to breathe life back into the dead person. These interventions all seem to solve the existential challenge of death, but a question arises whether such digital afterlives (re)connect lives, or rob death of some of its existential meaning.
Sleep is a temporary disconnection that mirrors the permanent disconnection of death. If the anxieties that keep us up at night can potentially be solved in a low-tech way (for example through music, movement, and meditation), these solutions appear slow and uncertain in comparison to high-tech alternatives: hardware to buy and software to install. Lying in bed, one’s mind hesitates to let go; technology seems to offer a solution. Nansen, Mannell, and O’Neill explore this new digital landscape in Chapter 6. There
are technologies marketed as tools to help one go to sleep, stay asleep, sleep soundly, benefit from sleep, and wake “naturally.” These technologies finetune external aspects of the sleeper’s environment to facilitate a beneficial form of disconnection, including sound, light, and temperature, while “paying attention” to the sleeper’s metabolic processes. The sleeper becomes less of a disconnected body-mind and more of a body-mind “upgraded” to a special kind of connection within a sleep-inducing “architecture” that never sleeps or goes dormant.
We can take the idea of architecture more literally by returning again to the theme of disconnection. Recalling that “old” manifestations of disconnection include abandoned structures, derelict places, and ruins, it is unexpectedly productive to inquire into the future of ruins. Without continued maintenance, human constructions have historically been subject to diverse and fascinating processes of deterioration (Weisman, 2007). The tumbled columns and gaping foundations that remain on the landscape lulled poets into sleepy meditation or haunted them as memento mori (compare Robert Browning’s poem “Love among the Ruins” to Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”). More adventurous souls have trespassed on such deserted places as a frontier of exploration (Edensor, 2005). But what happens when the things we build no longer crumble, collapse, rust, or decay? As Garcia and Miller show in their contribution to this volume (Chapter 7), virtual places and spaces that have been left behind can often still be accessed, and every virtual brick is still in place. No digital rats run in the alleys and no digital termites chew through the walls. Digital ruins send a tricky message about disconnection which lacks the traces of time’s passage that inspired poets. The fact that an abandoned digital place remains just as it was, despite changes in the outside world, makes it “an uncanny landscape haunted by the presence of past intents” (Garcia & Miller, this volume: p. 171).
Death, sleep, and ruins are similar in that they remind us of our insignificance, our frailty, our fleeting existence, our limitations, and our vulnerability. Technology seems to offer a cure for the malaise produced by such things, but a more accessible antidote resides in daily life. Immersion in daily life must certainly offer a solution to the existential puzzle of disconnection, all the more so if daily life is memorialized in photos, mementos, journals, and scrapbooks. In response to this impulse, many Chinese have taken up the leisure-time pursuit called shouzhang, transforming daily life into a curated artifact, archiving the self on decorative paper, embellished by slow
media like handwriting, still photography, and pasted ribbons. However, as Yan Yuan discusses in Chapter 8, digital media permeate this “slow media” culture. Aficionados turn to digital media for the purpose of sharing experiences, learning about slow media techniques, purchasing slow media supplies, and staying in touch with other practitioners. Once again, connection can be found haunting disconnection, like unseen ghosts and rats moving through the ruins of our digital lives.
If our online lives prevent us from fully detaching, and our existential encounters with death, sleep, and ruins, all take on qualities of attachment and connection rather than disconnection, then digital practices seem paradoxically to offer antidotes to digitalization. But whichever way we go to bow out, lie down, or wander off the scene, our digital replicas remain present, animated by digital data flows.
Rethinking Disconnection in a Disrupted World
All of this can prompt us to turn inward in an effort to disentangle the mind through practices of awareness, centering, and focusing that are sometimes referred to as “mindfulness.” While the term recalls meditation, the movement is also reminiscent of the temperance movements of the past century. Just as the prohibitionists linked alcoholism to poverty, crime, immorality and the breakdown of civilization, the “digital detox” movement views digital addiction as a force undermining physical and psychological health, disrupting social relations, and disconnecting humans from nature. In Chapter 9, Enli and Syvertsen analyze the discourse behind this phenomenon. In the promotional literature for digital detox, one repeatedly encounters a longing for an antidote to the noisy, hyperactive, addictive world of digital sensation-seeking, sensationalism, and sensuality. In Chapter 10, Pepita Hesselberth offers an insider’s view of detox retreats. A 21st-century inversion of the mid-20th century call to “turn on [and] drop out” (Stone, 2019), these structured gatherings help one to turn off and drop in. To achieve “reconnection of body, mind and soul” (Hesselberth, this volume: p. 254), one not only cuts off digital communications but also reestablishes familiarity with stillness through meditation, yoga, keeping silent, chanting, and other techniques for centering the mind. If constant connection is like a drug, then it is not surprising that people recognize its drawbacks cannot be
