Natale_0163443720914027.pdf (137.08 kB)
Vinyl won’t save us: reframing disconnection as engagement
journal contribution
posted on 2020-03-03, 16:02 authored by Simone NataleSimone Natale, Emiliano TreréDisconnection has recently come to the forefront of public discussions as an antidote to an increasing saturation with digital technologies. Yet experiences with disconnection are often reduced to a form of disengagement that diminishes their political impact. Disconnective practices focused on health and well-being are easily appropriated by big tech corporations, defusing their transformative potential into the very dynamics of digital capitalism. In contrast, a long tradition of critical thought, from Joseph Weizenbaum to Jaron Lanier passing through hacktivism, demonstrates that engagement with digital technologies is instrumental to develop critique and resistance against the paradoxes of digital societies. Drawing from this tradition, this article proposes the concept of “Disconnection-through-Engagement” to illuminate situated practices that mobilize disconnection in order to improve critical engagement with digital technologies and platforms. Hybridity, anonymity, and hacking are examined as three forms of Disconnection-through-Engagement, and a call to decommodify disconnection and recast it as a source of collective critique to digital capitalism is put forward.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Media, Culture and SocietyVolume
42Issue
4Pages
626 - 633Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Sage under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2020-02-18Publication date
2020-04-08Copyright date
2020ISSN
0163-4437eISSN
1460-3675Publisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Dr Simone Natale. Deposit date: 3 March 2020Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedLicence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC