EDITED BY Aleena Chia; Ana Jorge and Tero Karppi

2021, Rowman & Littlefield

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538147405/Reckoning-with-Social-Media

Once celebrated for connecting people and circulating ideas, social media are facing mounting criticisms about their anticompetitive reach, addictive design, and toxicity to democracy. Known cumulatively as the “techlash,” journalists, users, and politicians are asking social media platforms to account for being too big, too engaging, and too unruly. In the age of the techlash, strategies to regulate how platforms operate technically, economically, and legally, are often stacked against individual tactics to manage the effects of social media by disconnecting from them. These disconnection practices—from restricting screen time and detoxing from device use to deleting apps and accounts—often reinforce rather than confront the ways social media organize attention, everyday life, and society.

Reckoning with Social Media challenges the prevailing critique of social media that pits small gestures against big changes, that either celebrates personal transformation or champions structural reformation. This edited volume reframes evaluative claims about disconnection practices as either restorative or reformative of current social media systems by beginning where other studies conclude: the ambivalence, commodification, and complicity of separating from social media.

Introduction and Chapter 6 are available open access, respectively at: https://rowman.com/webdocs/reckoningwithsocialmediaintroduction.pdf and https://rowman.com/webdocs/reckoningwithsocialmediachapter6.pdf

ToC

Introduction: Reckoning with Social Media in the Pandemic Denouement: Aleena Chia, Ana Jorge, and Tero Karppi

Why Disconnecting Matters? Towards a Critical Research Agenda on Online Disconnection: Magdalena Kania-Lundholm

The Ontological Insecurity of Disconnecting: A Theory of Echolocation and the Self: Annette N. Markham

‘Hey! I’m back after a 24h #DigitalDetox!’: Influencers posing disconnection: Ana Jorge and Marco Pedroni

Privacy, energy, time and moments stolen: Social media experiences pushing towards disconnection: Trine Syvertsen and Brita Ytre-Arne

Quitting Digital Culture: Rethinking Agency in a Beyond-Choice Ontology

Zeena Feldman

Ethics and Experimentation in The Light Phone and Google Digital Wellbeing: Aleena Chia and Alex Beattie

From digital detox to 24/365 disconnection: between dependency tactics and resistance strategies in Brazil: Marianna Ferreira Jorge and Julia Salgado

Overcoming Forced Disconnection: Disentangling the Professional and the Personal in Pandemic Times: Christoffer Bagger and Stine Lomborg

Disconnecting on Two Wheels: Bike touring, leisure and reimagining networks: Pedro Ferreira and Airi Lampinen

Analogue Nostalgia: Examining Critiques of Social Media: Clara Wieghorst