



This essay picks up on the invitation extended by the sessions on ‘Media Archeology: Network(s)’ at FilmForum 2017 to engage, with some political urgency, in ‘an archaeological excavation of the post-Fordist, post-industrial and global emergence of the Network(s).’ In a time and age in which the network, to speak with Galloway and Thacker, ‘has emerged as a dominant form describing the nature of control today, as well as resistance to it’1 such a historicizing move seems all the more important, not just for the sake of historical depth, but also, in particular, in our attempts to re ne our understanding of the present-day situation. Taking up their invitation and yet giving it a somewhat different twist, in this paper, I will appraise a genealogy of what could be seen as the inverse of the network, or the idea of networked connectivity, which, I argue, in the last decade has manifested itself most clearly in the desire to disconnect. Drawing a link between the current preoccupation with digital detoxing and anti-television movement of the 1980s onwards, I will re ect on the relevance of doing such a historicizing comparative analysis.




application/pdf
2036-461X
16586
30
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Connect, Disconnect, Reconnect. Historicizing the Current Gesture towards Disconnectivity, from the Plug-in Drug to the Digital Detox
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
18
Beyond Cinema
2018-03-01
2021-10-06
2018-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Pepita Hesselberth
2018/03/01
Leiden University / University of Copenhagen
2036-461X
30
en
Connect, Disconnect, Reconnect. Historicizing the Current Gesture towards Disconnectivity, from the Plug-in Drug to the Digital Detox
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16586/16929
18
Connect, Disconnect, Reconnect
Historicizing the Current Gesture towards Disconnectivity,
from the Plug-in Drug to the Digital Detox
Pepita Hesselberth, Leiden University / University of
Copenhagen




Abstract

    This essay picks up on the invitation extended by the sessions on ‘Media
    Archeology: Network(s)’ at FilmForum 2017 to engage, with some political
    urgency, in ‘an archaeological excavation of the post-Fordist, post-industrial and
    global emergence of the Network(s).’ In a time and age in which the network, to
    speak with Galloway and Thacker, ‘has emerged as a dominant form describing
    the nature of control today, as well as resistance to it’1 such a historicizing move
    seems all the more important, not just for the sake of historical depth, but also,
    in particular, in our attempts to refine our understanding of the present-day
    situation. Taking up their invitation and yet giving it a somewhat different twist,
    in this paper, I will appraise a genealogy of what could be seen as the inverse of
    the network, or the idea of networked connectivity, which, I argue, in the last
    decade has manifested itself most clearly in the desire to disconnect. Drawing a
    link between the current preoccupation with digital detoxing and anti-television
    movement of the 1980s onwards, I will reflect on the relevance of doing such a
    historicizing comparative analysis.

   Digital detox holidays, phone stacking dinners, virtual suicide, a year without
Internet. In a culture obsessed with social networking, participation and
connectivity, to disconnect has come to mean going off-line: to reclaim presence
in the physical world; to revitalize face to face communication; to salvage the
actual over the virtual. To disconnect signals a desire to re-connect: with ones
off-line identity, with friends, with the spiritual values of life, with ones natural
environment, with the world at large. Disconnectivity thus bespeaks connectivity,
and vice versa. For every form of connectivity, whether desired or feared, there
is a correlative form of disconnectivity, dreaded or longed for. Each connection


1
 Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 4; here quoted in ‘FilmForum Udine/Gorizia, XV
MAGIS Spring School’, Program, 2017, <https://filmforumfestival.it/program/programs-in-pdf/
program-2017.pdf> [accessed 21 April 2018]. I thank Diego Cavallotti, Simone Dotto, and Andrea
Mariani and the anonymous reviewers at Cinéma&Cie for their generous support and productive
commentaries on earlier drafts of this article.

                                                  Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVIII, no. 30, Spring 2018
                                        Pepita Hesselberth


evokes the possibility of a disconnection that would instantly annul it, that
precedes it, and that conditions it.2
   In this paper, I would like to expand on this discussion on disconnectivity as
played out in public and scholarly discourse alike by offering a brief commentary,
in the first part, on one of the more dominant strands within the existing research
on disconnectivity, i.e. the discussion on technology non-use, which stands out
in the present context for its often overt lack of (critical) historicity. Then, in the
second part, I will respond by considering one possible way of historicizing the
current gesture towards disconnectivity. I will do so by drawing a link between
the call for digital detoxing that seems to have permeated public discourse today
and the anti-television movement’s appeal against the ‘plug-in-drug’ television
from the mid-1980s onwards. To conclude, in the final section I will end with
some remarks on the relevance of doing such a historicizing comparative analysis.


1.

   One of the more dominant trends within the existing research on the desire
to disconnect largely has its roots in the social sciences and emerged, first and
foremost, out of the investigations into the uses of technology instigated by
the advent of the digital in the 1990s. The realization that non-use can provide
valuable insights into the social functioning of technology more or less coincided
with the diffusion and arguable ‘domestication’ of the digital technology itself
from the mid-2000 onwards.3 In the social sciences this resulted in a expanding
body of empirical studies that not only challenge the pro-innovation bias of
digital media technologies (and arguably of media studies as such), but that
also seeks to depart from the user/non-user binary, thus opening up the way to
conceptualize technology non-use beyond the initial digital divide research. This,
amongst others, has given rise to a number of alternative taxonomies of non-use
that seek to complement and refine the typologies of ‘haves’, ‘have-nots’, and
‘want-nots’ to include more nuanced categorizations of non-users, like ‘rejecters’



2
  Elsewhere I have commented on the structuring paradox at play here, in part, by considering how
the (im)possibility of ‘opting out’ in an ‘always on’ culture is ruminated in scholarly discussions
on technology non-use, media resistance, and media disruption in particular. So many articles on
each of these topics have been published that it would take up way too much space to list them all
here, and any selection would be random without further comments. However, the reader will find
an extended (but by no means extensive) literary overview in the article listed below (with which
this article could be well read in tandem), as well as my take and a more elaborate reflection on the
gains and limitations, pendulums and pitfalls of the scholarly discourse on disconnectivity. Pepita
Hesselberth, ‘Discourses on Disconnectivity and the Right to Disconnect’, New Media & Society,
20.5 (June 2017),1994–2010.
3
  The reference here is to Roger Silverstone, ‘Domesticating Domestication. Reflections on the
Life of a Concept’, in Domestication of Media and Technology, ed. by Thomas Berker and others
(Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005), pp. 230–48.

110
                                Connect, Disconnect, Reconnect


and ‘resisters’, ‘rare users’ and ‘lapsed users’ to name but a few.4 These studies
are illuminating in that they draw attention to the complexity and ambiguity
of people’s motivations for, and practices of, technology non-use. Furthermore,
these studies are historically interesting because they all signal a growing unease
with the ubiquitous presence of connective media devices within our everyday
life and environment. The significant increase of these publication over the last
decade suggests that this unease has substantially grown from the mid-2000s
onwards.
   It is not my intention to downgrade the relevance or validity of these studies,
or of other persons perceived, performed, or uttered opposition to technology-
use as such. However, what bothers me about most of these studies into the
non-use of technology is their often manifest — or at times even blatant — lack
of (critical) historicity. To put it boldly: with its primary focus on the role of
individual agency in the social construction of technology — a focus that is at
times well motivated, and indeed historically well fought over — along with the
often descriptive use of data-driven taxonomies, these studies tend to privatize
and de-historicize the gesture towards disconnectivity without paying heed to the
historicity of the gesture, and therewith, to the specificity of its (re)incarnations
under the conditions of neoliberalism and our so-called ‘culture of connectivity’.5
   But the gesture towards disconnectivity, we know, is hardly a new phenomenon.
Resistance to (modern) technology is of all times, as are other forms of collective
or solitary reclusion. Practices like simple living and the slow movement find
their roots in anarcho-primitivism and the back-to-the-land movement that
emerged in the aftermath of the second industrial revolution, after the first had
given rise to the Luddites’ opposition to modern technology, which in turn finds
its contemporary in today’s neo-Luddite and other anti-technology movements
(including, arguably, Salafism). And the list goes on. That we are able to establish
such links requires hindsight, and does not mean that these movements are
necessary the same. But it does mean we can learn from them.


4
  See, for example, Sally Wyatt, Graham Thomas and Tiziana Terranova, ‘They Came, They Surfed,
They Went Back to the Beach: Conceptualising Use and Non-Use of the Internet’, in Virtual
Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, ed. by Steve Woolgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), pp. 23–40; Neil Selwyn, ‘Digital Division or Digital Decision? A Study of Non-Users and
Low-Users of Computers’, Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research in Culture, Media and the Arts,
34.4-5 (2006), 273–92; Christine Satchell and Paul Dourish, ‘Beyond the User: Use and Non-
Use in HCI’, in Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human
Interaction Special Interest Group OZCHI 2009 (New York: ACM, 2009), pp. 9–16, <http://
doi.acm.org/10.1145/1738826.1738829> [accessed 6 December 2016]; Eric P. S. Baumer and
others, ‘Limiting, Leaving, and (Re)Lapsing: An Exploration of Facebook Non-Use Practices and
Experiences’, in Proceedings to the CHI 2014 Workshop: Refusing, Limiting, Departing (New York:
ACM 2013), pp. 3257–66, <http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2470654.2466446> [accessed 6
December 2016].
5
  The reference is to José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); for a more elaborate discussion of (the limitations of)
this debate and the paradox inherent to it, see Hesselberth.

                                                                                                111
                                      Pepita Hesselberth


   In the remainder of this paper I would like to trace one of such possible
lineages — for indeed there are many: some compelling research has already
been done in this direction from the mid-2010 onwards. Here I think of the
studies of, for example, Ethan Plaut, who has likened today’s self-monitoring
apps to the swear jar as an early technology of communication avoidance; of
David Banks, who has traced the etymology of the distinction between ‘on- and
off line’ back to the emergence of the railroad in the late nineteenth century; and
of Florian Sprenger, who in a forthcoming paper reflects on the persistence of
notions of dis/connectivity in the earliest fantasies of electricity.6
   My ambition, here, is slightly less ambitious, and indeed less vested in the
archive or the histories of ideas as such, if only because, first, the lineage I
trace — from the digital detox to the plug-in-drug television — goes far less
back in time, and, second, my paper, in a way, is more critical than historical
in intent. What it shares with the aforementioned publications, however, is the
acute awareness of the need to historicize the contemporary gesture towards
disconnectivity, an interest that serves at once a cultural analytical and media-
archeological end.


2.

   That pre-occupation with the possibility ‘opting-out’ or ‘going offline’ is not
a new phenomenon, becomes clear when we compare the current fixation on
media addiction and digital detoxing to the moral concerns — expressed in both
public and scholarly discourse alike — about the ‘plug-in drug’ television, as, for
example, reflected in the following quote from one of the exponents of the anti-
television movement in the 1990s, TV-Free America:

        TV-Free America ‘encourages Americans to reduce, voluntarily and dramatically,
     the amount of television they watch in order to promote richer, healthier, and more
     connected lives, families, and communities’.7

     A similar vocabulary and intent is resounded in the definition of Digital Detox


6
  Ethan R. Plaut, ‘Technologies of Avoidance: The Swear Jar and the Cell Phone’, First Monday,
20.11 (November 2015) <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6295> [accessed
6 December 2016]; David A. Banks, ‘Lines of Power: Availability to Networks as a Social
Phenomenon’, First Monday, 20.11 (2015) <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/
view/6283> [accessed 6 December 2016]; Florian Sprenger, ‘Continuity and Disconnection,
Flows and Bursts: On the Interruption of Communication’, unpublished guest lecture given at
the University of Copenhagen on 13 February 2017; also see Florian Sprenger, The Politics of
Micro-Decisions: Edward Snowden, Net Neutrality, and the Architectures of the Internet, trans. by
Valentine A. Pakis and Christopher M. Kelty (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2015), pp. 100–04.
7
  Here quoted in Jason Mittell, ‘Cultural Power of an Anti-Television Metaphor: Questioning the
“Plug-In Drug” and a TV-Free America’, Television & New Media, 1.2 (May 2000), 215–38 (p.
215).

112
                                Connect, Disconnect, Reconnect


that can be found in the online Oxford Living Dictionaries (emphasis in the
original; the pun, however, seems unintended):

       Digital Detox
       NOUN
        A period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic devices such
    as smartphones or computers, regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress or focus on
    social interaction in the physical world; break free of your devices and go on a digital
    detox.8

   Indeed, it is easy to see how the current discourses on disconnectivity tap into
some of the same metaphors used by the anti-television movement in the 1980s
and ‘90s, as eloquently described by Jason Mittell in his essay ‘The Cultural
Power of an Anti-Television Metaphor’.9 Here one can think, for example, of
the discursive framing of entertainment media as ‘low culture’ or a ‘time waste’
(especially when compared to other activities); of their shared cultural nostalgia
for a ‘pre-screen’ era, when (or indeed where) people spend their time in physical
and mental good health, connecting with nature, family and friends, unspoiled
by the detriments of mass distraction; and finally, of the recurrence of the drug
metaphor in phrasings such as ‘plug-in-drug’ and ‘digital detox’.10 Of these three,
Mittell convincingly argues, it is first and foremost the latter that allowed these
media to be ‘viewed as a social problem […] worthy of a grassroots movement
dedicated to its eradication’.11
   Mittell goes on to unpack the metaphor of television-as-drug in a series of
tropes, or associated meanings, that again ring home to today’s discourses on
disconnectivity. Signaling the ubiquitous presence and overuse in the everyday
lives and environments of people (often supported with objective numerical
facts: so many hours of use, so many devices, and so on), these discourses
tend to stress the physiological effects of these omnipresent media on both the
individual and the social body, framing overuse as a public health issue (or even
crisis) in need of social control. This is reinforced by the equation of these media
with mind-altering substances — whether they be sedative, (over)stimulating,


8
   ‘Digital Detox’, Oxford Dictionaries | English <https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/
digital_detox> [accessed 3 October 2016; emphasis in the original].
9
   The anti-television movement also had its contemporary scholarly discourse, where television
consumerism by some critics was considered a threat to democracy and even seen as a
potential source of violence. See for example George Gerbner and Larry Gross, ‘Living With
Television: The Violence Profile’, Journal of Communication, 26.2 (1976), 172–94 <https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1976.tb01397.x> [accessed 3 October 2016]; Karl R. Popper and John
C. Condry, La Télévision : un danger pour la démocratie, (Paris: Anatolia, 1994). Popper’s BBC
interview ‘Against Television’ (13/04/1993) also circulated widely in academic discourse, especially
in Italy.
10
   Mittell, pp. 216–17. The term ‘plug-in drug’ in Mittell is derived from Marie Winn, The Plug-In
Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).
11
   Ivi, p. 216.

                                                                                               113
                                    Pepita Hesselberth


or hallucinatory —, by extension of which their usage is framed as a dangerous
habit, causing long-term degradation that must be eliminated for the sake of
one’s own health. This feeds into a third trope, which is the suggestion that
these media are addictive, causing people to struggle with their ‘use’ and suffer
from ‘withdrawal symptoms’ when they stop using. ‘[T]o complicate notions of
personal responsibility and consensual activity’ even further, Mittell observes,
these discourses are often centered around children, thus strengthening the call
for political action.12
   Drawing on Janice Radway’s examination of the metaphorical framing of the
reading of popular literature in terms of ‘consumption’ (Radway’s essay is called:
‘Reading is not Eating’13) Mittell maintains that the seeming simplicity of these
metaphors work to structure the very way we conceive of these media in terms
of consumption and sedation – whether it be popular literature (in Radway),
television (in Mittell), or connective media (as in our case). Instead of being
likened to a drug, they become identified with them, thus working to naturalize the
metaphor at hand (from being ‘like-a-drug’ to ‘is a drug’).14 This is problematic,
Mittell contends, not in the least because the drug metaphor is premised on a
circular logic15: it is because our engagement with television is framed in terms of
addiction that they are perceived as like-a-drug. Yet, at the same time its framing
in terms of addiction is already predicated on the assumption that television is
like-a-drug, rather than, say, a legitimate leisure activity (which indeed would
significantly have altered the discourse).
   What Mittell’s analysis of the profoundly reiterative effect of drug metaphor
makes clear, is how it works to obscure the complex socio-economic processes of
which these media and their reception partake, thus allowing for these media to
be constructed ‘as a scapegoat for social ills’.16 Crucial to the latter move, Mittell
observes, is the ‘understanding that it is the medium itself, not its programming
or its mis-use, that is the cause of the problem’.17 The same, I would argue, holds
true for today’s discourses on disconnectivity, in which the drug-metaphor still
strongly reverberates.


3.

   That the drug-metaphor persists so strongly within today’s discourses on
disconnectivity is perhaps not altogether surprising. Mittell — writing in 2000 —


12
   Ivi, pp. 220–30; quote is on p. 230.
13
    Janice A. Radway, ‘Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical,
Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor’, Book Research Quarterly, 2.3
(September 1986), 7–29.
14
   Mittell, p. 218; this argument is brought to the fore in Mittell’s critique of Winn.
15
   Ivi, p. 222.
16
   Ivi, p. 235.
17
   Ivi, p. 234.

114
                              Connect, Disconnect, Reconnect


notes in the first footnote to his paper that: ‘Ironically, TV-Free America has not
come out with any positions about the medium of computers and the Internet,
a format that they willingly use for publicity, yet do not criticize (or defend) for
its similarities to television.’18 A lot has changed since. TV-Free America, now
goes by the name of the ‘Center for SCREEN-TIME Awareness’ (CSTA), while
their annual event, the ‘TV Turnoff Week’ — in which millions of Americans are
said to have participated since its initiation in 1994 — was renamed ‘Screen-Free
Week’ in 2010 by the ‘Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood’ (CCFC),
after it was first transformed into ‘Digital Detox Week’ by Adbusters in 2008, to
reflect the growing prominence of digital devices in our everyday environment.19
But of course the spin-offs are numerous, and, somewhat ironically perhaps,
widely circulate online.
   Situating the current discourses on disconnectivity against the backdrop of
Mittell’s reading of the anti-television movement, then, is illuminating in that
it reveals, how, in the seemingly smooth transition from the anti-television
movement into the digital detox discourse, the drug-metaphor is retained, as are
its associated meanings. The comparison is also productive, however, in that it
brings to the fore some notable differences between the anti-television movement
and the current call for disconnectivity, of which the preoccupation with digital
detoxing is but one case in point.
   As already becomes clear from the various name changes above, for
example, the current discourses on disconnectivity and digital detoxing,
which have proliferated significantly, are much less unilaterally directed
towards one specific medium or device, but rather pertain to a wide variety
of forms of mediated connectivity (including screens but also, for example,
wireless connectivity). In addition, the current discourses on disconnectivity
are much more ambivalent in what they aim to achieve. To silence one’s
digital device, to go off-line, to unglue from the screen, or to unplug from
wifi-connectivity are all identified as a (seemingly self-imposed) means to
often uncertain and wavering higher ends. The Oxford Living Dictionaries’
definition of digital detox quoted above is illuminating here. On the one hand,
it demotes the current discourses on disconnectivity to a singular problematic
— i.e. that of the omnipresence of (addictive or poisonous) media devices in
our everyday environments. On the other hand, however, it leaves undecided


18
  Ivi, p. 235.
19
   ‘Screen-Free Week 2017’, Screen-Free Week <http://www.screenfree.org/> [accessed 10
April 2017]; admittedly a rather dubious website that also gives advice on cosmetic dental
surgery for children, presented by ‘Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood’ <http://www.
commercialfreechildhood.org/> [accessed 10 April 2017]. Adbusters has removed almost all
but one reference to the Digital Detox Week, which can be found here: Andrew Tuplin, ‘Digital
Detox Week Archives: Journal of the Mental Environment’, Adbusters: Journal of the Mental
Environment, <http://www.adbusters.org/tag/digital-detox-week/> [accessed 10 April 2017];
further see ‘Screen-Free Week’, Wikipedia, <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Screen-
Free_Week&oldid=756449484> [accessed 10 April 2017].

                                                                                          115
                                         Pepita Hesselberth


to what ends such detoxing may be put, thus allowing the fantasy or desire
of disconnectivity and technology non-use to tap into a more complex and
multifarious social dynamics than the sheer material presence of these screen
devices in our everyday lives alone suggests.
   Significantly, in the Wikipedia entry ‘Digital Detox’, concerns about time
waste, loss of touch with reality, and addictive behavior, are complemented with
concerns over privacy, reduced productivity, increase of stress, and attention
deficit disorder. This mix of concerns, which resonates with the overall public
discourse on digital detoxing, both on- and off-line, conspicuously ties various
micro-stressors (like fear of reduced productivity and ‘time waste’) to a single
macro-stressor, that is: the loss of certain ways of livelihood associated with the
advent of connective media, which, in turn, cannot but be linked to concerns
over labor loss due to automation and the flexibilization of labor under the
conditions of neoliberal reform. Moreover, where television was fiercely criticized
for its leisurely appeal from which the arguably ‘vulnerable’ viewer20 then had to
be emancipated or saved, the digital detox discourse started to emerge at the
precise moment when the initial appraisal of the so-called ‘new’ media — which
were celebrated for their emancipatory and democratizing potential and their
invocation of a renewed sense of agency long lost to the image of television’s
‘couch potato’ —, started to make way for more critical views of mass online
connectivity.21 While echo’s of the concerns over the viewers/ users vulnerability,
thus, can still be found in today’s discourses on disconnectivity, the general tone
of the current debate is significantly different, not in the least because it largely
retains the rhetoric of emancipation and a reclaimed control. Consequently,
contrary to in the anti-television discourse, the need for digital detoxing
today is often much less strongly defined around what it is against (television,
consumerism, time-waste). Consider, for example, the ‘Facts and Manifesto’
on digitaldetox.org, which is indeed far more ambivalent in this regard, in part
because it is less univocal.22


20
   For a reflection on this discussion in the Dutch context of public broadcasting, see Vincent
Crone, De Kwetsbare Kijker: Een Culturele Geschiedenis Van Televisie in Nederland (Amsterdam:
Vossiuspert UvA/Amsterdam University Press, 2007); the notion of the ‘vulnerable viewer’ is
derived from there.
21
   Illustrative, here, in my view, are the progressive titles of Sherry Turkle’s writings, from her 1984
classic The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, reprinted for the 20th anniversary edition
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), to her more recent Alone Together: Why We Expect
More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012) and Reclaiming
Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) (and everything
in between), which have become ever more critical.
22
    ‘Facts & Manifesto — Digital Detox®’, Digital Detox <http://digitaldetox.org/manifesto/>
[accessed 10 April 2017]; the manifesto is included as a whole; the European equivalent of
these ‘facts and manifesto’ can be found on Timetologgoff.com, ‘home of the Digital Detox’ in
Europe, here: ‘Digital Detox Facts | Internet Addiction Facts’, Time to Log Off <https://www.
itstimetologoff.com/digital-detox-facts/> [accessed 7 May 2017]; and here: ‘Manifesto’, Time to
Log Off <https://www.itstimetologoff.com/digital-detox-manifesto/> [accessed 7 May 2017].

116
                           Connect, Disconnect, Reconnect




                                        Fig. 1


   Although addiction and time abuse are still listed as number one threats in the
list of alarming ‘facts’ about our media usage (fig. 1), the ‘manifesto’ itself (fig.
2) brims with positivity and empowerment, postulating all the things ‘we believe
in’ (i.e. — personal! — freedom, joy, mindful living, and integrity) and ‘we value’
(real smiles and creativity, IRL — in real life — community experience, and the
outdoors).




                                        Fig. 2

   More than an attempt to reclaim life in the face of mass media consumerism, then,
the current discourses on disconnectivity, of which the digital detox craze seems
symptomatic, in my view signals something else. Here I would like to quote Tiziana
Terranova who summarizes the argument poignantly in her brief comparison
between television and digital media in her seminal essay on ‘Free Labor’, stating
that, where television is characterized by its ‘majoritarian discursive mechanisms of
territorialization’ and the application of morality, these mechanisms have become
largely redundant on the net, which in turn is driven, first and foremost, by ‘an
abundance of production, an immediate interface with cultural and technical labor
whose result is a diffuse, non-dialectical antagonism and a crisis in the capitalist

                                                                                 117
                                       Pepita Hesselberth


modes of valorization as such.’23 Elsewhere I have elaborated more extensively on
the link between free labor and the ‘the right to disconnect’ discussion.24 Suffice
it to say for here, is that there is a significant difference between the morality of
anti-television movement and the digital detox discussion, which is intimately tied
up with the changing status and flexibilization of labor under the conditions of
neo-liberal reform and our increasingly media saturated culture. Watching less
television, in other words, was seen to make you a better person, spending less
time (wastefully) on-line, is above all seen to make you a better worker: more
productive and less prone to stress and burn-out — for which, incidentally, we
now increasingly seem to be held personally accountable. Such is the might of the
digital detox discourse: it privatizes the solution to what is in fact, and is seen by
many, as a mounting social problem, which is mass online connectivity.
    Symptomatic, here, is the slippery slope in the digital detox manifesto ‘Disconnect
to Reconnect’ between quality of living (real life experience), stress reduction
(mindful living, joy, the great outdoors), and increased productivity (reduce
distraction). The addition ‘to reduce stress’ in the aforementioned definition of
Digital Detox in the Oxford Living Dictionary, in my view, is crucial here, as it
unveils how concerns over the ubiquitous presence of connective media in our
everyday lives and environments that are biased towards constant availability have
become linked to concerns over attention deficit disorder, labor precarity, and the
desire, need or even ‘right’ to disconnect. Rather than obscuring the complexity of
the social processes of which these technologies partake, then, as Mittell claimed
in relation to television, I argue that the current discourses on disconnectivity
are interesting precisely for what they reveal about the complexity of the social
processes of which these technologies take part, so that it may be argued that it is in
these discourses in particular that the limits of our current ‘culture of connectivity’
are most forcefully negotiated.


   Funding
   This work was supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research Humanities
| Culture and Communication (grant no. 5050-00043B)




23
   Tiziana Terranova, ‘Free Labor’, in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed.
by Trebor Scholz, (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 33–57 (p. 52; first publ. in Social Text, 18.2,
Summer 2000, 33-58).
24
   See my aforementioned essay on ‘Discourses on Disconnectivity and the Right to Disconnect’
with which this essay can be read in tandem. Also see Pepita Hesselberth, ‘Creative Control: Digital
Labour, Superimposition, Datafication, and the Image of Uncertainty’, Digital Creativity, 28.4
(October 2017), 332–347.

118
