Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- One En/forcing the Tokyo 2020 Olympics: The Racialization of Digital Engagement and Digital Solutionism
- Two Digital Engagements and Work–Life Balance in Creative Labour
- Three ‘#RoeVsWadeOverturned: Any Idea How Fast Your #PeriodtrackingApp Can Lead To Jail?’: Digital Disengagement and the Repeal of Roe vs Wade
- Four #SnailMailRevolution: The Networked Aesthetics of Pandemic Letter-Writing Campaigns
- Five Data Minimalism and Digital Disengagement in COVID-19 Hacktivism
- Six Digital Solutionism Meets Pandemic Imaginaries
- Seven State Violence, Digital Harms and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Imagining Refusal, Resistance and Community Self-Defence
- Epilogue: Digital Disengagement – Questions of Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Digitalities
- Index
Epilogue: Digital Disengagement – Questions of Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Digitalities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- One En/forcing the Tokyo 2020 Olympics: The Racialization of Digital Engagement and Digital Solutionism
- Two Digital Engagements and Work–Life Balance in Creative Labour
- Three ‘#RoeVsWadeOverturned: Any Idea How Fast Your #PeriodtrackingApp Can Lead To Jail?’: Digital Disengagement and the Repeal of Roe vs Wade
- Four #SnailMailRevolution: The Networked Aesthetics of Pandemic Letter-Writing Campaigns
- Five Data Minimalism and Digital Disengagement in COVID-19 Hacktivism
- Six Digital Solutionism Meets Pandemic Imaginaries
- Seven State Violence, Digital Harms and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Imagining Refusal, Resistance and Community Self-Defence
- Epilogue: Digital Disengagement – Questions of Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Digitalities
- Index
Summary
This book began with a critical question – ‘What is the place of digital refusal in the fabric of pandemic and post-pandemic life?’ – which emerged as part of our collective reflection on the rise in digitization during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond. The process of answering this question was often accompanied by the rapidly diminishing possibility of stepping away from compulsory digitalities. Presenting the paradigm of digital disengagement that challenges the normalization of the digital (and of digital solutionism in particular) and foregrounds opting out and refusal as a starting point, the book thus explores a number of aspects of digital disengagement in pandemic and post-pandemic times. Some of our contributors have focused explicitly on the social and political effects of forced digital engagement; for example, Esperanza Miyake's discussion of its macro-level global economic and racializing power, or Serra Sezgin's analysis of its impact on micro-level working practices and work– life balance. Others have documented and analysed practices of disengagement and refusal, and the paradoxes they involve. Sam Martin's chapter explored digital disengagement, which relies on furthering one's digital skills and data literacy to avoid datafication, state surveillance and potential criminalization through use of fertility apps, whereas Chelsea Butkowski detailed how over-saturation with digital connectivity during the pandemic led many to step away from the digital almost entirely into the domain of pen and paper – only to share the results online afterwards. Continuing the topic of digital disengagement as a means of resistance to surveillance, Annika Richterich turned to hacker practices of data minimalism as a method to systematically, consistently and deliberately reduce the level of invasive datafication. Here, digital disengagement is less about a break away from the digital, but instead is about its systemic reduction. Moving to exploration of digital disengagement in the context of climate crisis and ecological harms, Adi Kuntsman's chapter looks at systemic forms of digital reduction to reduce the toll of pandemic digitization on the environment. Concluding and expanding the discussion of digital disengagement in contexts of systemic harms, Seeta Pena Gangadharan and Patrick Williams discuss the possibilities of digital disengagement as resistance to state power and the violence it inflicts on racialized communities.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Digital DisengagementCOVID-19, Digital Justice and the Politics of Refusal, pp. 176 - 181Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023