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DOI: 10.1177/1461444817711449
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Discourses on disconnectivity
and the right to disconnect
Pepita Hesselberth
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Leiden University Centre of
the Arts in Society, The Netherlands
Abstract
Taking the “right to disconnect” discussion as a starting point, this article considers how
the im/possibility of “opting out” is ruminated in scholarly discourses on technology
non-use, media resistance, and media disruption. I argue that while very different in
scope, these discourses converge in that they all revolve around a structuring paradox.
On one hand, this paradox is set in place by the paradox of dis/connectivity itself
(no disconnectivity without connectivity). On the other hand, I argue, it is incited
and reinforced by the use of scholarly methods that appear to be at odds with the
gesture of disconnectivity itself, whether they be empirical, discursive, or technical (or
legislative). This article stakes a claim for the importance looking at these discourses on
dis/connectivity from the point of view of this structuring paradox, for it is here, I argue,
that the limits of our current “culture of connectivity” are most forcefully negotiated.
Keywords
Connectivity, culture of connectivity, digital detox, disconnectivity, media disruption,
media refusal, media resistance, paradox of dis/connectivity, right to disconnect,
technology non-use
In March 2016, the Suddeutsche Zeitung published an article with the title
“Anwesenheitswahn in der Arbeit—das muss aufhören” (“Availability Fixation at Work—
It Must End”; Öchsner, 2016). The article is one of the many in an ongoing debate in
Germany that was triggered by the labor council enforced decision to put a ban on the
Corresponding author:
Pepita Hesselberth, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, PO Box 9515, Leiden 2300 RA,
The Netherlands.
Email: p.hesselberth@hum.leidenuniv.nl
711449NMS0010.1177/1461444817711449New Media & SocietyHesselberth
research-article2017
Article
2 new media & society 00(0)
work-related use of communicative devices after working hours at both Volkswagen and
BMW. This means that quite literally, from somewhere early 2012 (VW) and 2014
(BMW) onward, all mail that reaches these company’s server after office hours is put on
hold or deleted, and company phones go off-service from the end of day, until the begin-
ning of the next. Setting aside for the moment any reservations or appraisals one might
have about such a decision, what interests me about this debate is how it triangulates three
key concerns in the discussion on digital media use that up until that point were rarely
brought together, that is, first, the concern about digital labor, precarity, and the changing
labor market under the conditions of neoliberalist reform; second, the unease with the
ubiquitous presence of connective media devices in our everyday environments that are
biased toward constant availability; and third, the desire, or even need, to disconnect.
Although these concerns have each attracted considerable attention from scholars work-
ing in the fields of critical theory, media studies, and the social sciences, and are indeed
intimately intertwined, their interconnectedness as such is surprisingly rarely addressed,
even if its relevance often seems presupposed.1
In this article, I will unpack some of the concerns raised in the “right to disconnect”
discourse by considering how the (im)possibility of “opting out” in an “always on” cul-
ture is ruminated in the scholarly discussions on technology non-use, media resistance,
and media disruption. My point in identifying these strands within the existing scholarly
discourses on disconnectivity is not to separate them by force, nor to give one precedence
over the others, but rather to draw attention to the structuring paradox that lies at the
heart of these discourses on disconnectivity, whether they be empirical, discursive, or
technical (or indeed legislative, or just popular).
On one hand, this paradox is set in place by the paradox of dis/connectivity itself (no
disconnectivity without connectivity). On the other hand, I argue, it is incited and rein-
forced by the use of scholarly methods that appear to be at odds with the gesture of dis-
connecting itself, whether these are driven by data gathering, critical inquiry, or the use
or techniques against technology.
Given the expanse of the current discourses, the notion of disconnectivity that I work
with is necessarily an unstable one, and indeed, we can detect various shifts of meaning
between, and even within, the various strands of research in which the notion recurs.
Sometimes the same term is used to refer to different things, or different terms (or no
terms at all) are used to refer to more or less the same phenomenon. This is part and
parcel of the difficulty of defining disconnectivity in terms of a general problematics.2
For the sake of clarity, however, I will distinguish between what I call the discourses on
disconnectivity (whether they be scholarly or popular), and what, for better or for worse,
I here have dubbed the gesture toward disconnectivity, which I loosely define as the
tendency toward voluntary psychic, socio-economic, and/or political withdrawal from
mediated forms of connectivity.
Technology non-use
One of the more dominant trends of the existing research on the gesture toward discon-
nectivity largely has its roots in the social sciences and consists mainly (though not
exclusively) of empirical research, both quantitative and qualitative, into the uses and
Hesselberth 3
non-use of technology focusing on individual (non)users. It is not my intention, then, to
give a full overview of the work done in this direction (it is a rather extensive body of
work), but mainly to highlight some of the key concerns and relevant transformations
within these discussion, as well as some of their limitations, and only to the extent that
they tie in with and contribute to our understanding of the current debate on digital dis-
connectivity that seems to have permeated public discourse today.
The discussion on technology non-use first and foremost emerged out of the investi-
gations into the uses of technology instigated by the advent of the digital in the 1990s. In
these initial discussions, non-use was primarily looked at from the point of view of the
then growing concern (among policy makers and scholars alike) about the risk of digital
exclusion and the so-called digital divide. Non-use of media technology here is primarily
framed as an issue of material or cognitive deficiency (lack of access, lack of means, and
lack of skills, distinguishing the haves from the have-nots) and also of (belated) adapta-
tion, instigated by technophobia (the want-nots), ideological refusal (the refuseniks), or
simply non-acceptance (the so-called laggers of diffusion theory). Although relevant at
the time, the main problem with many of these earliest accounts, Niall Selwyn (2003)
argues, is that in making the distinction between use and non-use, these studies often take
for granted, or at least presume, the beneficially and desirability of information and com-
munication technology (ICT) use, thus positioning the non-use of technology as abnor-
mality and deviation from the norm; a deficit to be overcome, a problem to be solved.
The use of technology, Selwyn points out, requires human agency, which, in turn,
“implies the ‘possibility of choosing to act otherwise’.” (Orlikowski quoted in Selwyn,
2003: 12).
The realization that non-use can be studied as more than a rest-category (i.e. the other
of use), and as such can provide valuable insights into the social functioning and social
milieu of technology, more or less coincided with the diffusion and arguable “domestica-
tion” of the digital technology itself. It resulted in a burgeoning body of research that not
only challenges the pro-innovation bias of digital media (and arguably of media studies
in general) but also departs from the fallacy of the user/non-user binary, thus opening up
the way to conceptualize non-use in more nuanced terms. This, among others, has given
rise to a number of alternate taxonomies of different types of non-use that seek to com-
plement, refine, and oftentimes contest the aforementioned typologies of the digital ine-
quality research.
To name just a few examples: Wyatt et al. (2002), in a well-known and oft-cited arti-
cle with the seminar title “They Came, They Served, They Went Back to the Beach,”
distinguish voluntary from involuntary non-use, and past use from never used, resulting
in a typology of resisters and rejecters, the excluded and the expelled. Wyatt (2014)
would later nuance this typology by further differentiating between forced, reluctant,
partial, and selective use. In similar vein, Selwyn (2006) separates active users from
lapsed users, rare users, and non-users, while Satchell and Dourish (2009) find evidence
for auxiliary distinctions between lagging adopters and active resisters, between the
(geographically and socio-economically) disenfranchised, and the disenchanted (i.e.
those “for whom reluctant use is associated with nostalgic wistfulness for a world pass-
ing out of existence”), and finally between displacement use (elsewhere called use-by-
proxy) and sheer disinterest. This typology, to name just one other likable example, was
4 new media & society 00(0)
then partly contested by the findings of Baumer et al. (2013), who argue that although
their results show no empirical evidence for lagging adoption, it does bring to light an
emerging phenomenon they call “lagging resistance,” which they define as “a sense of
wanting to quit but not doing so just yet” (p. 8).
These studies further show that the motivations for, and practices of technology non-
use on the level of individual agency vary greatly and are often complex and ambiguous,
not in the least because some of the same social qualities may be at play in both people
choice to use and not to use digital technology. Peer pressure, negative stigmatization,
technology fatigue, the network scale effect, a sense of (dis)empowerment, the need for
socio-economic security, or the distress over violating personal or professional relation-
ships, for example, are seen to play a role in both people’s engagement with and disen-
gagement from digital technologies. Complicating matters even further, people’s
disengagement from technology is rarely total, but often situational, specific to the
medium (e.g. one may opt out of using a cellphone but use a computer), to the time and
place of (non)use (e.g. only during work, not during dinner or in the library) and to the
purpose of one’s abstinence (e.g. privacy concerns may trigger different types of non-use
than productivity concerns).
Important for our purpose here is the fact that despite the complexity and ambiguity
of people’s motivations for, and practices of technology non-use, these studies nonethe-
less converge in that they all signal an emergent unease with the ubiquitous presence of
connective media devices within our everyday lives and environments, and that judging
by the significant increase in these publication over the past two decades, this unease is
substantially growing. These studies are further illuminating in that they bring to light
some of the limitations and challenges of studying the desire to disconnect in situ. Here
one can not only think of the often self-identified problems of recruitment (how does one
study [let alone find] people not doing something) and of communicative intent (how
does one study the non-use that is not explicitly voiced but merely enacted or just wished
for) but also of diction (do people mean the same thing when they say they want to opt
out, disconnect, unplug, detox, abstain from, or simply not use a particular digital tech-
nology) and the ambiguity of cultural practice (a Facebook quitter might be a fanatic
Twitter user, and temporally opting out may not be the same as total abstinence).3
The key constraint of this line of research, to me, however, is a different and less self-
identified one—one that has much to do with the uneasy relation between the data-driven
research methods used and the topic it seeks investigate, that is, the gesture toward dis-
connectivity. With its primary focus on the role of individual agency in the social con-
struction of technology, along with the often descriptive and de-historisizing use of
data-driven surveys and taxonomies, this strand of research in my view uncomfortably
feeds into the paradigm of datafication from which the one who disconnects arguably
precisely seeks to withdraw.
Although at times well motivated, and indeed historically well fought over, the shift
from structure to agency, from criticism to empiricism, and dare I say it, from a neo-
Marxist research paradigm to a neoliberal one, moreover, tragically coincides with a
research climate in which the university—to quote Henry Giroux (2008)—is increasingly
forced to “[narrate] itself in terms that are more instrumental, commercial and practical,”
(pp. 2–3) which means that this kind of research not only tends to get relatively
Hesselberth 5
well-published and well-funded but also seems to have somewhat lost its connection with
the disconnect it seeks to investigate, both precisely because it fits the paradigm of big
data and the neoliberal university so well. To the point, my aim here is not to discard all
empirical research or disparage ethnographic methods as such, but merely to point out
some of the limitations and risks of studying disconnectivity in this way. These risks are
perhaps best summarized as the risk commodification, instrumentalization, and/or
depolitization. To each (and all) an example.
There are many studies that explicitly take up a design perspective in their analysis of
practices of non-use. In an oft-cited article commissioned by Intell entitled “Infrastructures
and their Discontents,” Mainwaring et al. (2004), for instance, use experimental ethno-
graphic methods to investigate the articulated discontents with technological infrastruc-
tures among communities of self-identified homeschoolers and gated communities, and
what they call security seekers and “true disconnectors” (or voluntary simplicity advo-
cates), so as to establish how these discontents challenge ubiquitous computing systems
and, as such, offer opportunities for “future ubicomp research and design” (p. 2).
Significantly, the rationale behind investigating practices of non-use and “living off the
grid,” here, is first and foremost to advance the “grid” itself, that is, to develop stronger,
more adaptive infrastructures that enable people to develop more sustainable relations
with technology, thus putting the discourses on disconnectivity to a corporate use.
If these studies are nonetheless among my favorites within the technology non-use
strand, despite their corporate interest, it is first and foremost because they are upfront about
what they try to achieve, as opposed to, say, those studies that remain largely “descriptive”
in their use of empirical methods, as if they were neutral, which—I would claim—they are
not: their bias is in their form, that is, it is precisely the suggested objective neutrality that
makes these studies liable to be instrumentally used, arguably against their own intent.
More disconcerting, in my view, then, are the studies that work from such a limited
understanding of technology and behavioral response that their conclusions are necessar-
ily wont to isolate any observation about the individual’s non/use of technology (here
understood as specific device) from the context from which they both emerge. A case in
point, here, for example, are Lee et al.’s (2014) “Supporting Temporary Non-Use of
Smartphones” and Schoenebeck’s (2014) “Developing Healthy Habits with Social
Media” whose pedagogic titles already reflect their moralizing undertone. These studies
converge in that they both attribute people’s failure to diminish their technology use to
loss aversion and lack of self-regulation, suggesting that of all the strategies one can
adopt to disengage from such technologies, only mental effort, will power, and self-
control prove to be efficient. What I find flustering about these accounts is how effort-
lessly they lend themselves to a narrative of personal responsibility and the neoliberalist
model of governmentality it taps into, in which individuals are unapologetically held
accountable for their own (mis)use of technology, and therewith for their time-waste and
burnouts, as if these can be divorced from the newly emerged economy of attention and
the technological milieu that sustains it; a milieu, we know, that is not only biased toward
constant availability, lifelogging, and datafication but also thrives on the exploitation of
our “free labor” (Terranova, 2000) in ways that are remarkably reminiscent of what
anthropologist Natasha Schüll (2014) calls Addiction by Design in her seminal book on
machine gambling.
6 new media & society 00(0)
Finally, in a number of more recent studies that blend over into the second strand,
technology non-use has increasingly more often been framed as a form of empower-
ment or even resistance (e.g. Woodstock, 2014) that is habitually seen to tie in with
other lifestyle choices. From the Amish and orthodox Jews, for whom technology non-
use (somewhat unsurprisingly, perhaps) coincides with dedication to community and
religion (Ems, 2015; Shahar, 2016), to the so-called green communities, the slow
movement (Rauch, 2011), and other more individualized lifestyle attitudes (hipsters!),
the negation of media technologies, here, is seen to articulate the resisters commitment
to self-determination, real-life social relations, and more sustainable forms (simple) of
living. These observations are then oftentimes loosely correlated to social variables
such as class and education, suggesting that digital exclusion does not always, and not
necessarily, imply social exclusion (a heritage, I believe, of the digital exclusion
research), but in fact must be considered as an indicator of class, educational, and/or
gender privilege: (as if) only the rich can disconnect and only intellectuals and leftist
want to (Haywood, 1998). In a compelling variation on this research, media resistance
is conceived to be gendered to the extent that women are identified as the gatekeepers
of technology resistance in Amish and Jewish orthodox communities (Shahar, 2016)
and as the care-workers who enable men’s public refusal of social media use in every-
day life (Portwood-Stacer, 2014). Without wanting to downgrade the relevance and
validity of any of these observations, nor of people’s perceived opposition to technol-
ogy as such, it becomes problematic in my view when such opposition is uncritically
framed in terms of resistance without paying heed to the quandary of political dissent
under the conditions of neoliberalism, that is, the fact that every form of (consumer)
activism tends to open up new market potential and new forms of governmentability,
an issue to which I will return below.
Media resistance
This brings me to what I would like to identify as a second strand, or generation if you
will, of the existing research on disconnectivity, which distinguishes itself from the stud-
ies of the first strand, first, in its broad scope and use of mixed method; second, in its
critical historicism; and third, in its critical inquiry of media resistance.
In relation to the first. In part developed in response to some of the aforementioned
challenges and limitations of the technology non-use research on which it nonetheless
builds, these studies largely depart from the use of empirical methods and the exclusive
focus on individual users and practices of non-use alone, to focus more on how the dis-
comfort with, and disengagement from, technologically mediated forms of connectivity
is discursively framed in public discourse over time. Using mixed methods, these studies
often attend to a rich variety of recourses besides user data, including user comments,
blogs, social media discussions and technologies, newspaper clippings, magazines, web-
sites, advertisements, industry pamphlets, governmental brochures, memo’s, industrial
patents, as well as all kinds of apps, video essays, and events such as the Sabbath
Manifesto, #facebooksucks, Quit Facebook Day, the National Day for Unplugging, and
the unremitting call for digital detoxification which seems to have permeated public
discourse today.
Hesselberth 7
Drawing on a comprehensive selection of such material, Kristin Foot (2014), for
example, traces the simultaneous emergence of a range of critical “discourses about
reducing or avoiding media use, altering media practices, and attempting to influence
media policies” across a variety of social realms in the United States between 2009 and
2011. Foot uses the term media pushback to refer to such discourses, calling attention to
the pervasiveness of the preoccupation that transpires in public discourse from the late
2010s onward with what Morrison and Gomez (2014), in line of Foot, have called the
“evertime of constant online connectivity.” The import of Foot’s initial study for our
purpose here lies in the realms of pushback she identifies beyond that of personal and
social relations (where pushback manifests itself in the desire for downtime, face-to-face
relations, and privacy), that is, that of work and organizational dynamics (where push-
back recurs in concerns about time-waste, lack of attention, and productivity), and that
of politics and the military (where media pushback resurfaces in concerns about data-
abuse and security risks). It is in these social realms that the preoccupation with discon-
nectivity has indeed gained particular prominence since the early 2010s.
The studies of the second strand further distinguish themselves from those of the first
in that many of them seek to situate the current gesture toward disconnectivity against
the backdrop of its historical predecessors. Apart from the many references, albeit often
in passing, to the likes of Henry Thoreau’s Walden, the 19th-century Luddites, and the
anti-television movement of the 1980s (with which the digital detox discourses indeed
share a remarkable number of semblances), this is reflected in the studies that explicitly
take up a media-archeological perspective. In “Lines of Power,” David Banks (2015), for
example, situates the current preoccupation with going “offline” against the backdrop of
the fierce debates fought over the emergence of the railroad industry in the 1920s, to
which the distinction between being on- and offline indeed can be etymologically traced
back. His comparative analysis sheds light on how the notion of the “online” has always
already been enmeshed—then, it seems, as much as it is now—with connotations of
commodification (of everything that is on the line, including people as goods), and in-
corporation (literally, the making corporate of all areas affected by the line), and its cor-
responding structures of propriety. In another study, Ethan Plaut (2015) uses the
pre-digital tool of the swear jar to reflect on today’s technologies of communication
avoidance, such as the vastly popular self-monitoring or communication avoidance apps
such as iSwear, ViceJar, and Unface. While these tools enable their users to unyoke from
the echo chamber of the Internet and the “incessant ‘ding’” of their communicative
devices, his study draws attention to how these technologies also play into the neoliberal
project of privatizing solutions to what should perhaps be conceives of as social prob-
lems, whether it be noise pollution and communicative excess (in Plaut), or issues such
as attention deficit and availability fixation, as in the case of the opening example.
Significantly, Plaut calls attention to the remarkable “dissonance between language of
technological control and open-air freedom” that, he claims, is “endemic to these tech-
nologies that promise empowerment through limitation.” It is by way of these disso-
nances, he argues, that these tools of communication avoidance place the burden of
dealing with these issues on the individual.
This brings us to a third, and related, way in which the studies of the second strand
complement those of the first, and that is in the way they further theorize and problematize
8 new media & society 00(0)
the idea of disconnectivity as a form of media resistance under the conditions of neoliberal
reform. In one of the most persuasive commentaries on the empowerment discourse of
media resistance, Laura Portwood-Stacer (2013) does so by framing what she—with an
overt reference to Marcuse—calls media refusal, as a form of lifestyle politics, meander-
ing between consumer activism and its troubling counterpart: the neoliberal credo of par-
ticipatory culture. Productively transposing Veblen’s late 19th-century Theory of the
Leisure Class to the present-day context, Portwood-Stacer (2013) uses the term “con-
spicuous non-consumption” to refer to this kind of media refusal, suggesting that nowa-
days “to ostentatiously remark upon one’s refusal is to implicitly align oneself with those
socially privileged groups among whom non-use is not the norm” (pp. 1047, 1043).
The import of Portwood-Stacer’s (2013) argument for our purpose here lies in the
notable asymmetry, or “discursive mismatch,” she discerns between, on one hand, the
ways in which the conscious disavowal of (in her case: social) media is discursively
framed by the refusers (that is, as a persuasive practice of social critique), and on the
other hand, “the discursive frames through which such refusal is (mis)interpreted” (that
is, as self-righteous elitism, a-sociality, or technophobia). So, again, the issue of cultural
privilege is brought up. Media refusal is congruently defined as
a performative mode of resistance, which must be understood within the context of a neoliberal
consumer culture, in which subjects are empowered to act through consumption choices—or in
this case non-consumption choices—and through the public display of those choices. (p. 1041)
In similar vein, Ribak and Rosenthal (2015) call attention to “small scale preferences,”
or “micro-resistances,” like “content filtering, screen-time limitation and social media
rejection” through which, they claim, people nowadays negotiate their experience of medi-
atization. Although they make a point of differentiating these micro-resistances from the
(macro) refusal Portwood-Stacer addresses, the authors nonetheless suggest that these
micro-resistances are also instrumental to the neoliberal capitalist discourse. Drawing on
Sarah Banet-Weiser’s work on brand culture, they propose the term media ambivalence to
refer to such resistances, thus calling attention to the dialectical refraction they enable of,
on one hand, “the utopic technological optimism that developers and advertisers promote,”
and on the other hand, people’s “dystopian worries over addiction and nomophobia, unmit-
igated availability, surveillance, privacy violation, distraction and interference.”
So, again, we see some of the same issues of depolitization, commodification and
instrumentalization come up, but unlike in the studies of the first strand, here, these
issues are self-reflexively addressed, part and parcel of the very topic of critical inquiry.
This does not mean, however, that the studies of the second strand are not also fraught
with some methodological challenges of their own. For here, too, there appears to be
somewhat of a disconnect between the scholarly methods used and the object of inquiry,
that is, the gesture of disconnectivity, albeit in a different way. Where the disconnect of
the first strand largely revolved around the paradox of the datacentric bias of empirical
research vis-à-vis the gesture toward disconnectivity, or the being out of data, in the
second strand, I argue, it largely revolves around the logocentric bias of discourse anal-
ysis, in which the discourses on media resistance, refusal, ambivalence, avoidance, and
pushback are necessarily implied, vis-à-vis a gesture that derives, at least in part, its
Hesselberth 9
vigor from its attempt to escape, defy, and arguably demobilize the totalizing logic of
logos, and its corresponding politics of demos; one of which Deleuze (1997) has aptly
written, “Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force
them to express themselves” (p. 172).
In submitting the gesture toward disconnectivity—in its various guises, only some of
which semantic—to a discursive analysis while adhering to a dialectical model of political
action, then, I argue, there is always the risk of subjecting the gesture of disconnectivity
to the primacy of logos, that is, words and language. It is as if what is said or written about
disconnectivity is deemed of greater importance than the gesture itself, a term that is here
understood with both Foucault (1975: 152) and performance theory (e.g. Benjamin, 1998;
Butler, 2006) as the various forms of nonverbal or even nonphysical communication
through which embodied structures of power are (re)produced and potentially disrupted,
as well as with Berlant (2011) as “only a potential event, the initiation of something pre-
sent that could accrue density, whether dramatic or not” (p. 199). It comes as no surprise
then, to me, that—rather than embracing the “little gaps of solitude and silence” that
Deleuze pines for and the gesture toward disconnectivity arguably allows—so many of
these studies end up foregrounding the dissonances, asymmetries, and ambiguities of lan-
guage, to which they then themselves curiously add in their accumulative jest. For such is
the fate of scholars working within the neoliberal university (myself included), in which—
with the need for quantifiable output and the jargon of “deliverables” and “impact
factors”—the adage “publish or perish” has been pushed to yet another extreme.
As a model for political action, dialectics is both discursive and exceedingly dualistic.
Founded on demonstration and interlocution, it aims at the inclusion and recognition of
those who have no part within the discourses through which it operates; as such, it seems,
it cannot but affirm the rift between those unaccounted for and those who count, us and
them, part and whole, all or nothing—it needs the binary to sustain itself. (Lazzarato,
2014: 225–49) But what of those who do not seek to be included or accounted for?
Indeed, what if what matters most in the gesture toward disconnectivity, however public,
is not what is carried out in language, or any other representational form, but rather what
transpires in (its subsequent) silence, in experiment and action, in different kinds of pres-
ence, and in the alternate ways of being with technology that the gesture toward discon-
nectivity affords, enables, or envisions—however singular, and however momentarily?
By attributing disconnectivity’s politics mainly to the enunciation of resistance and
ambivalence, moreover, there is always the risk of blackboxing the technology, and thus
separating technology from politics, individuals from their devices, and human from
non-human forms of agency. This becomes all the more pertinent once we realize that
expressions of media resistance and refusal, to the extent that they are digitally mediated,
on the level of (corporate) algorithms often cannot but affirm the paradigm of mass digi-
tal connectivity that the resister arguably refuses to accept. This brings me to the third
strand within the scholarly discourses on disconnectivity.
Media disruption
The idea that in the absence of an outside the only disruptive disconnect possible may be
the one effectuated from within the digital network itself has triggered what could be
10 new media & society 00(0)
identified as a third strand within the existing scholarly discourses on disconnectivity. In
books with suggestive titles like Off the Network (Mejias, 2013), Disconnect.Me (Karppi
2014), and Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harcourt, 2015), to
name but a few, the studies of the third strand explicitly bring the current discourses on
disconnectivity to the critical debates on algorithmic connectivity, big data, mass surveil-
lance, digital labor, and platform capitalism. Arriving at a turning point in the critical
reception of digital media technologies, they significantly depart from the empowerment
discourse of the 1990s and early 2000s in which digital networks were commended for
their potential to emancipate, inform, and empower its users, instead placing emphasis
on the rising concerns about the detrimental social, political, cultural-economic, and
environmental implications of mass online connectivity. While different in scope, and
coming from various backgrounds, these studies thus converge in their shared concerns
about totalizing logic of connectivity and the unprecedented levels of (wage) inequality,
monitoring, and control it has given rise to, as well as in their interest in how digital
networks can be disrupted through digital means.
If the studies of first strand can be said to focus more on the micro-sociological
level of disconnectivity, then the studies of the third take on a more macro-sociological
perspective; or, if we were to phrase it in terms of the standing debate over the primacy
of structure and agency, the studies of the first strand lean stronger toward foreground-
ing the role of individual agency in the use or non-use of technology, whereas the stud-
ies of the third strand tend to lean more toward foregrounding the (infra)structures
underpinning today’s digital networks and the distribution of power, money, and
agency (and water! see Hogan, 2015) within them. The distinction, however, is not
rigid. Like the technology non-use research ties people’s motivations and practices to
macro-sociological factors, network theorists often explicitly address the micro-socio-
logical implications of networked connectivity, especially in their attempt to probe the
pockets and possibilities for disruption it may provide, both for the individual and for
the collective. In relation to the studies of the second strand, moreover, the studies of
the third further expand on the topic of media resistance, this time by reframing it in
technological rather than solely discursive terms. It is here that the notion of discon-
nectivity acquires yet another meaning.
While each of the studies of the third strand has its own take and way of explaining
how media disruption as a form of disconnectivity might work, Mejias account of the
potential “unmapping” of the network is illustrative here. Working from an understand-
ing of the digital network as “a composite (or assemblage) of human and technological
actors (or nodes) linked together by social and physical ties (the links) that allow for the
transfer of information about some or all of these actors” (p. 11), Mejias scrutinizes the
shift he observes from using the network as a way to describe society, to using it as a
“template for organizing sociality,” thus placing emphasis on the material, praxis, actors,
and movements that make up the network’s infrastructure.
Like the early technology non-use research, Mejias is concerned about the new forms
of underdevelopment that the digital gives rise to. Unlike in the technology non-use and
digital divide research, however, the underdevelopment he seeks to address here is not so
much underdevelopment through exclusion, but rather, precisely, underdevelopment
through inclusion. In a time and age in which inclusion has become the norm and
Hesselberth 11
participation of the hallmark of sociality, Mejias states, “the consensual acceptance of
the terms of use,” invokes an illusory sense of empowerment and equality, as if everyone
who participates in the network does so “on the same terms enjoyed by everyone else”
(p. 8). This, obviously, is not the case, which, he asserts, has to do with the network’s
strong nodocentric and monopsonic tendencies. Defining nodocentrism as the logic
whereby the network renders everything invisible that is not a node, and monopsony as
a market structure characterized by the existence of many sellers (us) of the same product
(data) and only a few wholesale buyers (say Google, Facebook, or the NSA), Mejias
claims that within today’s nodocentric networks, increased participation is on a par with
an increase in inequality, as stronger nodes tend to get stronger, while smaller nodes are
deemed less and less relevant, if seen at all. In such a context, he argues, inclusion always
come at a price. Here, he identifies three. First, by participating in digital networks,
activities from outside the market are transposed into it in exchange for access of means
(commodification and exploitation of free labor). Second, bit by bit, our social activities
are converted into the private property of a few big corporations through acts of liking,
clicking, and sharing (privatization of social life). Third, as a result of the trope of total
inclusion everything that is not included—and thus cannot be subjected to the computa-
tional models prescribed by the network—is automatically considered as either outdated
or a threat (condescension and surveillance of the disconnected) (pp. 3, 19–36).
Actualized nodes, however, Mejias rightly points out, are but momentary objectivities
(p. 88). As a system for organizing our knowledge about the world, nodocentrism thus
first and foremost marks a crisis in the imagination “of how we [can see] ourselves as
individuals in a community,” (p. 14) as it fixes identity, excludes otherness, and fore-
closes the open-endedness of being (as becoming, or, the virtual). This is so because,
from the point of view of digital networks and computation, the only thing that can be
processed, or captured, is that which already exists; this means it presupposes calculabil-
ity. “Unmapping the network,” in this context, refers to the process of generating
moments of dis-identification (in Mejias) or disobedience (in Harcourt) from the net-
work’s dominant nodes and links, so as to disrupt, unsettle, undermine, or unthink—that
is, to unmap—the network itself.
A telling example of what such a disruptive disconnect might look like comes from
Tero Karppi (2011), who, in his article “Digital Suicide and the Biopolitics of Leaving
Facebook,” discusses two digital artworks from 2009, Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0
Suicidemachine, designed to enable Facebook users to commit a “virtual suicide” on the
social media platform. The goal of these apps, Karppi observes, “is not simply to help
users quit but to introduce different potential ways to exist in social networks.” Using
Facebook’s own infrastructural logic and design, what these digital suicide services ena-
ble, Karppi claims, is the cutting loose of people’s online identity from its “attachments
to the moulding ‘I’ of the offline identity.” Drawing on Galloway and Thacker’s (2007)
earlier deliberations of the “tactics of nonexistence” (pp. 135–37), Karppi claims that
what remains online after the digital suicide has taken place is “given a non-existence.”
This nonexistence, however, is not empty, but full, “in the sense that it does not refer to
any other subject than itself.” It is a faux presence, but a presence nonetheless, devoid of
any representational identity, significant only in its a-signification. It is worth to quote
Karppi at length here:
12 new media & society 00(0)
The identity that remains in Facebook after digital suicide becomes meaningless for the
machinic subjectivation of capitalism: its data cannot be used for marketing, its consumption
habits cease to exist. It is not representative for statistical analysis since it does not represent a
population that exists. Simultaneously its actions cannot be anticipated and premediated since
it does not have any. It remains in the network as passive and ascetic.
What Karppi brings to the fore, in other words, is an act of obfuscation, defined by
Brunton and Nissenbaum (2011) as “the production of false, misleading, or ambiguous
data to make data gathering less reliable.” Significantly, unlike in the aforementioned
technology non-use and media resistance discourses, the disconnect envisioned and
enacted here is not so much between man and technology, nor does it necessarily entails
people’s disengagement from technology. Quite to the contrary, if anything, the disrup-
tion and disconnection conferred here first and foremost point to these critics’ liability,
often in theory as well as in practice, to the (once) emancipatory promise of digital net-
works, which is where the potential of this kind of disruption, dis-identification, and
disobedience resides. Mejias (2013) makes this clear from the start, where he writes that
“this book will not be calling on anyone to stop using any kind of digital network,” or
“embark on a journey to some remote corner of our contemporary life to find subjectivi-
ties or sites untouched by digital networks,” a tendency he accuses of “romanticizing
some prenetworked state of being” (p. 12). Nor will it “be promoting a network Luddism,”
for “no responsible person can afford to be a luddite” (sic!).
Where Karppi focuses on the systemic noise incited by what remains of people’s data-
doubles after their untimely departure, Mejias—in line of his critique of nodocentrism—
proposes to look at the paranodal as a site of resistance, and thus pays attention to what
does not conform to and falls outside of the network’s dominant nodes and links (e.g.
broken links and signal blockers, viruses, white spots and rogue nodes, pirate initiatives,
and slow movements). In addition, he considers serious gaming as a playground for
opening up the digital to the possibility of the virtual. Bernard Harcourt, whose book
revolves more around issues of exposure, privacy, and security, in his turn broods over
leaking, ludic corporatism, and the securization of private information as effective forms
of (civil) disobedience. Galloway and Thacker name counter-protocols, good viruses,
and spam among their more elucidatory examples.
The message is clear. Expanding on Hardt and Negri’s (2005) dictum “it takes a net-
work to fight a network,” these studies profess the idea that digital forms of connectivity
can only be contested from within and fought on their own terms, even if what these
terms exactly are, arguably, remain yet to be decided and may differ depending on the
purpose of one’s resistance, the actants involved, and the technologies used, or opposed
to (p. 58). In the spirit of a hacker ethics, these studies look at instances where the black
box of technology can be opened up and the solutionism of the engineers of online soci-
ality is interrupted. They seek to explore and experiment with particular techniques, ethi-
cally, so as to free these techniques from the purportedly all-encompassing technological
paradigm of which they partake (the so-called “media environment”), in an attempt to
weaken the grip these technologies of mass connectivity have on us.
In experimenting with, and thinking through, the possibilities of technological disrup-
tion, nonetheless, there is always also the risk of playing into the very project these
Hesselberth 13
strategies set out to disrupt. It is worth to briefly reiterate the aforementioned risks of
commodification, instrumentalization, and depolitization, which here are equally in
place, albeit perhaps more in practice than in theory. Here one can think of, for example,
the exploitation of hacking and modding as a form of free labor (commodification); of
the use of twitter bots, Internet trolls, fake news, and other forms obfuscation by oppres-
sive regimes or in the more recent political campaigns in the west (instrumentalization);
and finally, of the move from a hacker ethics to the recruitment of ethical hackers by
universities, governments, corporations, and the industrial-military complex (depolitiza-
tion). These risks and limitations are perhaps best summarized by Mejias’s (2009) remark
that “Any attempt to contest the tyranny of the nodes simply creates new peripheral and
exotic sites to be indexed” and thus assimilated (p. 614).
In addition, though it would go too far to fault these authors of a tacit technological
determinism and, therewith, of techno-centric bias, there nonetheless appears to be a
certain finality to their claim that these networks of mediated connectivity are here to
stay, however nuanced and well-informed their analysis may be. In this, especially the
studies by Harcourt and to some extent also Mejias share quite some common ground
with the Internet optimists and skeptics they so clearly seek to depart from. Moreover,
one cannot fail to note that their studies remain largely conceptual throughout and tend
to pay far more attention to sketching the staggering extend of our current “digital enclo-
sure” (Andrejevic, 2009), to which most of their books is meritoriously dedicated (no
doubt for good reason), than to the possibilities for disruption and disobedience at of
which their respective titles speak.4
The main limitation of this strand of research within the present context, in my view,
however, is a different one, one that has more to do with the fact that the strategies for
disruption these studies propose—at least at first glance—may appear to be quite far
removed from the more existential desire or need that both the gesture toward discon-
nectivity and the “right to disconnect” discussion tap into—especially for those for
whom such strategies may not be as easily available as for the well-informed few: code
literates, net activist. It is this more existential desire or need that holds my interest here.
To the extent that we can speak of a structuring paradox in this context, then, it revolves
around counterintuitive suggestion that to “opt out” in the present context, or to invoke
or secure ones “right to disconnect,” one (first) has to connect more, that is, spend more
time, energy, and effort engaging with these connective technologies, even if they are the
very thing, or paradigm, one wishes to opt out from.
The paradox of dis/connectivity
Using the “right to disconnect” discussion as a starting point, I have scrutinized the schol-
arly discourses on disconnectivity by calling attention to the structuring paradox that lies at
the heart of the discussions on technology non-use, media resistance, and media disruption,
as well as of the gesture toward disconnectivity as such. That this is still a topical debate
becomes clear when we consider the amendments made to Article 55 of the controversial
new French labor law that went into effect as of January 2017, in which the employee’s
droit à la déconnexion is now legally enshrined but arguably no longer lawfully defended.5
Again, a structuring paradox is in place, as the law is likely to effectuate precisely
14 new media & society 00(0)
the opposite of what it tries to achieve. For, where the law commands employers and
employees to reach an agreement about the latter’s “right to disconnect,” this right appears
to be neither mandatory nor binding. With the passing of this law, then, it would seem that
the employee can no longer invoke this “right” under the traditional conditions of waged-
labor, where it would be on a par with one’s unpaid, or free, time. Instead of protecting the
employee, then, the law runs the risk of turning all our available hours into the time of
(unwaged) labor, thus feeding into the very problematic it tries to oppose, a problematic
that charaterizes our current “culture of connectivity,” of which Van Dijck (2013) ironically
writes: “Opting out of connective media is hardly an option. The norm is stronger than the
law; if not, it would be too hard for any regime to control its citizens” (p. 174).6
What, then, can we learn from the paradox that structures the discussion on dis/con-
nectivity? The paradox is instructive, I argue, in that it discloses the limit of our current
culture of connectivity, to which the gesture toward disconnectivity in my view attests.
Against the claim that there is “no outside” to our current “culture of connectivity,” I
argue, these discourses posit a significant counterclaim. But this entails two provisos.
First, these discourses show that resistance to technology is not necessarily about tech-
nology in the narrow sense of the word (as specific techniques, devices, or practice), but
rather more often pertains to a more general loss of ways of livelihood made unavaila-
ble to us through the logics of datafication and automation enabled and reinforced by
mass-mediated forms of networked connectivity. The paradox of dis/connectivity, in
this sense, can be said to wield a stricter interpretation of a more general problem with
regard to contemporary human-technical life (or technics to use Bernard Stiegler’s
(1998) term). From this point of view, the gesture toward disconnectivity is not so much
about the refusal or dislike of “technology,” but rather “operates as an affirmative force
that holds the capacity for transformation” (Rossiter, 2004: 21). The gesture, in other
words, is already enfolded in the technological paradigm of connectivity, thus affirming
its paradoxality. Therefore, as Ned Rositter has argued in a slightly different context
before me (writing on creative industries), these discourses make clear, second, that any
political theory of our present-day network culture needs to take into account its “con-
stitutive outside,” that is, the material, symbolic, and strategical forces that in the words
of Chantal Mouffe “cannot be reduced to a dialectical negation,” as they are at once
“incommensurable with the inside, and at the same time, the condition of emergence of
the latter” (here quoted in Rossiter, 2004: 31). The paradox of dis/connectivity, I argue,
constitutes such an outside. This also explains why the gesture toward disconnectivity
does not take on a single form, why the discourses are not univocal, and why it is so
important to consider them together, in their very equivocality, for it is only then, I
argue, that we can begin to see the limit of our present-day “culture of connectivity.”
The paradox of dis/connectivity here figures not so much as a “special condition” of
some inspired individuals, but rather can be seen to play a crucial part in renegotiating
the “social contract” we live by, in part, by imagining forms of life beyond its limit, so
that the hold that the logic of mass-mediated connectivity has on us can be weakened.
Funding
This work was supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research Humanities | Culture &
Communication (grant no. 5050-00043B).
Hesselberth 15
Notes
1. I thank Sam Hind, Yasco Horsman, and the anonymous reviewers at NMS for their construc-
tive feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
2. An issue that I do not address here for reasons of space and focus, but that nonetheless is
of pivotal importance to the discussion on disconnectivity is the topic of “passive” techni-
cal or forced forms of disconnection (see, for example, Sprenger, 2015: 100–103), which
also brings to light different genealogies of the paradox of dis/connectivity that can be argu-
ably traced back to the history of ideas on communication and electricity, as, for example,
addressed in Chang (1996) and Peters (2001).
3. In listing these limitations, I draw on Plaut (2015) and Portwood-Stacer (2013).
4. Mejias and Harcourt both devote about 30 of their respective books of 190 and 360 pages to
disruption and disobedience.
5. LOI no. 2016-1088 du 8 août 2016, available at: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTex-
teArticle.do;jsessionid=0BC9982B940B860C43882B2558DCD12A.tpdila19v_1?idArticle=
JORFARTI000032984268&cidTexte=JORFTEXT000032983213&dateTexte=29990101&c
ategorieLien=id
6. (emphasis added) That I attribute a certain irony to this remark rather than cynicism, has to
do with the fact that Van Dijck, in the all but five pages she devotes to the (im)possibility of
“opting out,” on one hand, suggests that opting out is significantly hampered by, among oth-
ers, social impediment like peer pressure, while, on the other hand, in the acknowledgements
to her book, she “pledge[s] allegiance to the academic peer review system” (173; viii)—a
“system,” we may well do to remember that, as a “system” of measured numbers, impact fac-
tors, and output quota, has become one of the hallmarks of the neoliberal university.
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Author biography
Pepita Hesselberth is University Lecturer at Leiden Universtity Centre for the Arts in Society,
Department of Film and Literary Studies, the Netherlands. She is the author of Cinematic Chonotopes
(Bloomsbury 2014), and the co-editor of a volume on Compact Cinematics (Bloomsbury 2016, with
M. Poulaki). She is currently working on her project on Disconnectivity in the Digital, for which she
received a fellowship from the Danish Council for Independent Research and is appointed as a
research fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
