Workshop: The Politics of Disconnection and Disruptive Media
The workshop explores the possibilities of disconnection in digital culture and is the second event in a series dedicated to questions of disconnection. Current discourses on digital culture often link media technologies to immediate delivery and constant availability that result in the experience of hurried lives and a culture of speed (Davis, 2013; Rosa, 2013; Sharma, 2014; Tomlinson, 2007). However, in this context practices and technologies of disconnection emerge as well. We are interested in exploring how disconnection, i.e. the non-usage of digital media technologies is constructed as being of economic, cultural, social and political value in contemporary, information affluent societies. As the abundance of media technologies contributes to the necessity to make choices for connection or disconnection, use or non-use, participation or abstention, these choices are becoming of interest to the digital economy.