"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 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, it then moves on to consider digitally entangled lives and afterlives, and concludes with a look at the ambiguities of (dis)connection in time-spaces of the COVID-19 pandemic"-- Digital networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have revolutionized everyday human interaction by facilitating the search for, and access to, information, entertainment, and social connection. But with the rise of digital surveillance and data extraction for profit, more people are
seeking not just to disconnect from technology but to fully disentangle themselves from the widespread social, economic, and political networks of digital communications.
Disentangling offers an interdisciplinary global analysis of this growing trend toward disconnection. Moving beyond technological disconnection, this volume proposes the term disentangling as a lens for re-thinking the structures of our digital world and categorizing the ways in which people
reject, avoid, or rework their digital networks. Across twelve chapters, contributors explore the existential issues stemming from digitally entangled lives, including cultural capital and digital detox retreats, and investigate how geographies of disconnection relate to wider societal challenges.
Additional chapters explore connections between digital disconnection and other forms of disconnection, including death, sleep, and the abandonment of human settlements. The volume closes with a reflection on connectivity in the post-pandemic society and how we might rework our connections to fit a
socially distanced world.
Blending philosophy and sociology with media geography,
Disentangling offers a crucial reflection on how we might unravel our digital dependence by reasserting resilient boundaries between ourselves and the surrounding political, economic, cultural, and technological systems.
