Description
Please join us for a lecture by visiting academic Adi Kuntsman (Manchester Metropolitan University). Kuntsman has identified an overwhelming tendency within media research to focus mostly on engagement with the digital realm, which effectively normalize all processes that take place as a result of the digital itself. Svitlana Matviyenko (School of Communication, Simon Fraser University) will respond to Kuntsman’s paper.
Disengagement from the digital realm, on the other hand, is rarely considered as anything but an aberration. Such an aberration might be seen as temporal, such as a deliberate short-term ‘digital detox’; or demographic, by groups that fail or choose to not engage with certain platforms due to lack of skills, age or beliefs; or even ideological–as a form of political protest. Digital disconnection remains an exception, a deviation. But what if we took disengagement as our starting point of thinking about digital media? How can we centre disengagement (disconnection, digital refusal, and opting out) as both empirical phenomena and an entry point to contemporary media research and analysis?
This lecture is part of the Simon Fraser University, School of Communication’s Book & Speaker Series.
