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Using the overlooked and seemingly trivial digital practices of scrolling, swiping, and snapping as a vantage point, this ethnography explores how young people in Vienna inhabit digital time and space amid boredom, unemployment, migration, school pressures and fragmented life trajectories. By combining digital and design anthropology, it situates these mundane digital practices within historical continuities and broader societal regimes that value productivity and discipline while negating idleness and practices associated with marginalized populations. Through fieldwork, workshops, and co-design, it reveals how digital devices are entangled with experiences of sociality, waiting, and boredom, offering an alternative to moralizing narratives of “mindless scrolling” and of scrolling through digital worlds.
“This book is empirically rich, methodologically sound and theoretically advanced. It contains a wide range of ethnographic examples that provide important insights into the lifeworld of Viennese lower-class youth” • Martin Slama, Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
“A richly storied, illuminating account of the plight of migrant teens in Vienna as they navigate the precarious pathways of life online and offline.” • Natasha Schull, NYU
Suzana Jovicic is an Assistant Professor of Digital Anthropology in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research critically examines topics such as digital inequalities, digital literacy, design and internet addiction. She employs not only ethnographic and multimodal perspectives but also integrates participatory methods and co-design into her work.
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. (Digital) Inequalities
Chapter 2. Social Choreographies
Chapter 3. Doing Boredom
Chapter 4. Scrolling and Swiping
Chapter 5. Playing and Snapping
Chapter 6. Wasting Time
Chapter 7. (Un)desirable Flâneurs
Chapter 8. Mastery of Space-Time
References
Index