Disentangling

Abstract

Abstract After the rapid rise of digital networking in the 2000s and 2010s, we are now seeing a rise of interest in how people can disentangle their lives from the increasingly pervasive networks of digital communications. This edited volume contributes to the turn toward digital disconnection research by bringing together an interdisciplinary group of authors with expertise in various forms and philosophies of disentangling. By “disentangling” we mean disconnection not just from media but from a digitalized world, a world in which places and landscapes are increasingly structured around digital connectivity. People increasingly look for strategies that will let them reject, avoid, and rework the pervasive media demanding they remain connected at all times. How might we facilitate autonomy from tendrils of digital surveillance, revalue places over dematerialized flows, and unravel digital dependency? Who gets to disconnect and who does not? How do natural cycles such as sleep and death relate to disentangling? Can we clarify the means and objectives of “digital detox”? Can we map the failures, glitches, contradictions, and paradoxes that plague digital connectivity? What does our willing and unwilling entanglement in digital networks say with regard to social resilience and cultural resistance? The book’s three sections start with questions about ethics and justice associated with the power geometries of digital (dis)connection, then move on to consider digitally entangled lives and afterlives, and conclude with a look at the ambiguities of (dis)connection in time-spaces of the COVID-19 pandemic.