Digital Disentangling and the "Return to Place"
Topics: Digital Geographies
, Media and Communication
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Keywords: digital disconnection, digital detox, slow media, analogue media, place
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 27
Authors:
Paul C. Adams, University of Texas at Austin
André Jansson, Karlstad University, Sweden
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Abstract
Whereas geographers have scrutinized the divides that exclude people from digital media, and have touched on the ways in which life is reterritorialized in digital media, scant attention has been paid to the nature, means, and aspirations of deliberate disconnection from digital media. Addressing such issues requires critically examining the connection/disconnection dialectic. This dialectic is symbolically associated with more and less mediated senses of place so that connecting to digital media seems to take us out of place and disconnecting seems to return us to place. This is not to assert that online situations cannot be experienced as places. Indeed, characteristics of place—location, local, and sense-of-place—all exist in online interactions. However, the peculiar physicality of territorially bounded place (multisensory qualities, embedded analogue media, opportunities for physical contact, and relative privacy) facilitates certain performances of self (e.g. "digital detox"), certain models of social interaction (e.g. IRL), and certain active integrations of space and time (e.g. "slowness"). The aim of this paper is therefore to introduce disentangling as an emerging social practice constructed in opposition to the forces that render digital communications ubiquitous, pervasive and entangling, and to outline a research agenda that links disentangling to the aspirational project of a “return to place.”
Digital Disentangling and the "Return to Place"
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Virtual Paper Abstract
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