Strategies for the suspension and prevention of connection: Rendering disconnection as

socioeconomic lubricant with FacebookBen Light @doggybElija Cassidy

The Connectivity Conundrum

Facebook  helps  you  connect  and  share  with  the  people  in  your  life.  

Capture  and  Share  the  World's  Moments  Instagram   is  a  fast,  beautiful  and  fun  way  to  share  your  life  with  friends  and  family.  

Welcome  to  LinkedIn,  the  world's  largest  professional  network  with  250  million  members  in  over  200  countries  and  territories  around  the  globe.  Our  mission  is  simple:   connect   the  world's  professionals   to  make   them  more  productive  and  successful.  

Twitter   helps   you   create   and   share   ideas   and   information   instantly,   without  barriers.  Twitter   is   the  best  way   to   connect  with  people,   express   yourself   and  discover  what's  happening.  

YouTube   allows   billions   of   people   to   discover,   watch   and   share   originally-­‐created   videos.  YouTube  provides   a   forum   for   people   to   connect,   inform,   and  inspire  others  across   the  globe  and  acts  as  a  distribution  platform   for  original  content  creators  and  advertisers  large  and  small.

Reassembling Connectivity

• Networked Society (Castells 1996)

• Networked Individualism (Wellman 2001)

• Networked Collectivitsm (Baym 2007)

• Networked Publics (Ito 2007; boyd 2008)

• Personal Connections in a Digital Age (Baym 2010)

• Connect and Create (Light et al 2012)

• Networked Masculinities (Light 2013)

• The Culture of Connectivity (van Dijck 2013)

Resistance and Appropriation

• Although social media and the networked publics they are commonly associated with, might encourage a particular line of appropriation (boyd 2008, boyd 2011), or attempt to set the tone for use (Papacharissi 2009).

• It is also acknowledged that even though certain technological arrangements may seek to engage connectivity, users may not experience them as the designer envisioned (Griffiths and Light 2008, Baym 2010, Light and McGrath 2010, Cassidy 2013, van Dijck 2013, van Dijck and Poell 2013).

Interrogating Disconnection• encrypted pseudonyms on the French Minitel (Livia 2002)

• crypto-tagging, the use of face masking techniques, and the adjustment of audience settings (Lange 2007)

• discourses of digital inclusion and the digital divide (Hargittai 2007, Hargittai 2012),

• a lack of interest in SNS activity (Tufekcki 2008, Portwood-Stacer 2013)

• matrices of shades of use in comparison to heavy use (Hargittai and Hsieh 2011).

• not listening (Crawford 2009)

• fragmentation (Baym 2007)

• time out (Powers 2010)

• digital forgetting (Mayer-Schönberger 2011)

• private spheres of interaction (Papacharrisi 2010, 2011)

• Disconnect.Me (Karppi 2014)

Disconnective Practice (Light 2014; Light and Cassidy 2014)

• Disconnective Power

• Geographies of Disconnection

• Disconnectors

• Disconnection Modes

• Ethics of Disconnection

• Strategies - Prevention of Connection

• Strategies - Suspension of Connection

Disconnective Power

• 1DV: A has power over B because they can get B to do something they would not do otherwise. (It is made law that men cannot ride Salford public transport in skirts)

• 2DV: Power is exercised where the scope of decision-making is constrained and conflict suppressed. (Men can only wear skirts on Salford public transport if they are made of nylon)

• 3DV: Power is exercised by creating conditions so that conflict does not arise in the first place. (Men would never think of trying to board a bus in Salford, wearing a skirt, because they are conditioned to think this is not an option, and this is the case even though they might enjoy it if they did it)

Dislike Buttons Reject Friend

Reject Follower

Retweeting Moderating Use Historical Editing

Censorship Functions Resistance

Geographies of Disconnection

Disconnectors

Disconnection Modes

Ethics of Disconnection

• The exercise of editorial ethics which seeks to prevent harm to oneself and others through the enactment of selective disconnection.

• Privately public and publicly private strategies Lange (2007), the deployment of recontextualisation work and linguistic cover (Light 2014).

• Such acts could even be as simple as not posting about someone or not tagging someone in a photograph with an SNS.

• Questions of how SNS themselves may cause harm where disconnection does not occur are also raised – people’s experiences of uncensored shocking video content for example.

• Ethical judgements may also be tied to notions of disconnection whereby a person choosing not to connect for a given reason (such as not sharing a serious health condition) is written into being as doing the right thing.

Disconnective Strategies of Prevention of Connection

• Not friending

• Not playing Farmville

• Not liking

• Not linking

• Not tagging

• Linguistic cover

Disconnective Strategies of Suspension of Connection

• Holding friend requests

• Half viewing

• Friend culling

• Media breaks

Disconnection as Socio-economic Lubricant

Moving forward• Nuancing of appropriation to include

disconnection

• Serious attention to non-human disconnectors

• site philosophies and organisational policies

• infrastructures - 3g/4g, WiFi, app stores, toilets, bus stops, vehicles

• psychological aspects - lack of emoticon use or xxx

• Roles of disconnection - practical, economic, ethics, erotic

• Combining disconnective practice with other theory

This work is based on the following publications

• Light, B. (2014). Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

• Light, B. and Cassidy, E. (2014) Strategies for the Suspension and Prevention of Connection: Rendering Disconnection as Socioeconomic Lubricant with Facebook, New Media and Society 16 (7): 1169-1184

• Photocredits authors own except slide 1 (Guardian Image) and: https://www.flickr.com/photos/122762863@N02/galleries/72157643681239383/