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Digital Detox
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Against a backdrop of increasingly intrusive technologies, Trine Syvertsen explores the digital detox phenomenon and the politics of disconnection from invasive media. With a wealth of examples, th...
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30 March 2020

Social media and smartphones are criticised for being addictive, destroying personal relationships, undermining productivity, and invading privacy. In this book, Trine Syvertsen explores the phenomenon of digital detox: users taking a break from digital media or adopting measures to limit smartphone and social media use. Based on studies, documents, media texts and interviews with media users, Syvertsen discusses how media industries intensify the quest for attention, how companies and governments team up to get everybody online, and how the main responsibility for managing online risks and problems are placed on the users' shoulders. She provides a rich account of how users reduce their online engagement through time-limitations, restrictions on smartphone use, productivity apps, and use of analogue media. Syvertsen shows how digital detoxing has much in common with other forms of self-help such as mindfulness, decluttering and simple living and places digital detox within a culture of self-optimisation. But digital detox is also about sustaining face-to-face conversations, better work-life-balance, a deeper connection with nature and more meaningful interpersonal relationships. With a wealth of examples, analyses and stories, Digital Detox is a valuable guide to why digital detox and disconnection has become
a topic, how it is practised, what it says about the state of media industries
and how people express resistance in the 21st century.
Price: $25.99
Pages: 168
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Imprint: Emerald Publishing Limited
Series: SocietyNow
Publication Date:
30 March 2020
ISBN: 9781787693425
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Communication Studies, Media studies: internet, digital media & society, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies
‘Trine Syvertsen has again fascinated us with a reflexive and nuanced discussion of our guilt-ridden and ambivalent engagement with digital media. Situating the phenomenon of digital detox in the much longer history of media resistance, and its roots in the perceived pervasiveness of digital personal and mobile media, Syvertsen discusses how ”the problem” is framed, who is held responsible for solving it (spoiler: you!), what ”solutions” are offered, and how these are received among digital media users. A must-read for anyone who has ever owned a smart-phone!’
Trine Syvertsen is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Oslo. She has published extensively on topics of online media, television, media policy and media history, and is an expert on media resistance.
Chapter 1. Introduction: Do we have a problem?
Chapter 2. What is the problem? Intensifying the quest for attention
Chapter 3. You are the problem! Everybody online and self-regulation
Chapter 4. Managing the problem. Disconnection and detox
Chapter 5. The problem is personal - and social: Making sense of digital detox