The paradox and continuum of digital disengagement

Denaturalising digital sociality and technological connectivity

Bibliographic Data

ID11268083
AuthorsA Kuntsman (0000-0002-9970-9866, Manchester Metropolitan University), Esperanza Miyake (0000-0001-5504-7648, Manchester Metropolitan University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume41
Issue6
Pages901-913
Publication date2019-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMedia Culture & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-4437 • E-ISSN: 1460-3675
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0163443719853732
OpenAlexW2947648432
LanguageEN
Citations received57
References cited26

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

Affordance · Agency (philosophy · Cognitive psychology · Digital media · Disconnection · Disengagement theory · Epistemology · Everyday life · Phenomenon · Political science · Social media · Social science · Sociality · Sociology · Digital Games and Media · Impact of Technology on Adolescents · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Psychology