New edited volume: “The Digital Backlash and the Paradoxes of Disconnection”
Associate Professor Kristoffer Albris has co-edited the new edited volume “The Digital Backlash and the Paradoxes of Disconnection”, recently published on Nordicom. The volume, co-edited with Karin Fast, Faltin Karlsen, Anne Kaun, Stine Lomborg, and Trine Syvertsen, covers a range of social and cultural practices of digital disconnection, as well as critiques of the impact of digital technologies and platforms in the world today.
Focussing generally on how social practices and dilemmas related to new ways that people adapt to, appropriate, and push back against digital technologies in everyday life, the contributions span analyses of discourses and public debates around disconnection and the so-called techlash, the ambiguities and tensions of digital connectivity for work, labour, and productivity, the reordering of family and school life along with the perceived negative consequences of digital connectivity for the well-being of children and young people, as well as the playful and sometimes subversive recreational practices that people reinvent in search of authenticity as a response to all things digital.
One of the contributed chapters is additionally authored by Kristoffer Albris and DISTRACT PhD Malene Hornstrup Jespersen. The chapter "The Public Life of The Social Dilemma: Silicon Valley’s mea culpa moment and the rise of tech-dissidents" explores how the the Netflix blockbuster 'The Social Dilemma' was received on social media, comparing its reception in the US and Denmark. Albris and Hornstrup highlight how dominant discourses were composed both of praise for the film’s main message as well as critiques of its creators, and discuss how such critiques display a widespread scepticism of both positive and negative portraits of Big Tech coming out of Silicon Valley.
To read more about the volume and to dive into its chapters follow this link: https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/latest/news/hype-scepticism-new-book-examines-turning-point-digitalisation