Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media

Dependent, Distracted, Bored

Affective Formations in Networked Media

Susanna Paasonen

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Paasonen, Susanna, 1975- author.

Title: Dependent, distracted, bored : affective formations in networked media / Susanna Paasonen.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020022998 | ISBN 9780262045674 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Information technology—Social aspects. | Social media.

Classification: LCC HM851 .P25 2021 | DDC 303.48/33—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022998

d_r0

To Chip, Ken, and Ricky

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: From Loss to Ambiguity

2 Dependent: Agency and Infrastructure

3 Distracted: Affective Value and Fickle Focus

4 Bored: Flatness and Enchantment

5 Nostalgia: A Toxic Pursuit

References

Index

Acknowledgments

This book’s genesis dates back to Karlstad, Sweden, where I was briefly visiting late in the year 2011. Returning to my hotel after a very full day of travel and academic sociability, I was running a temperature and, to make things worse, unable to connect to the Wi-Fi. Powerless to resolve the glitch, I quickly found myself intensely frustrated to the point of rage, even while being aware of how disproportionate, and ludicrous, my reaction was. Rather than getting some rest, I then spent the next hour reflecting on the sharpness of affect involved in this involuntary disconnection, typing away. This incident sparked a more lingering interest in the affective speeds, rhythms, and intensities connected to technological failure. The following autumn, and for years to follow, I asked the students in my undergraduate class on Media and Networks in the department of Media Studies, University of Turku, Finland, to write short essays describing how mundane instances of technological failure feel. While I have used the essays for teaching purposes (see chapter 2 for details), I was simultaneously collecting research material (with the explicit permission of the students in question). First and foremost, my warmest thanks and gratitude to all the students who wrote and shared their stories. Without you there would be no book.

In a 2015 article, As Networks Fail: Affect, Technology, and the Notion of the User, published with Television & New Media, I drew on 45 of these essays. By this point, the project had grown into a hypothetical book, expanding from the irritating frustrations of failure to the complex entanglements of distraction, attention, boredom, and interest in networked settings. It was my idea to write up the bulk of this work during my 2015–2016 sabbatical leave while visiting MIT’s department of Comparative Media Studies and the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England, with kind invitations from T. L. Taylor and Nancy Baym, respectively, and with support from the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation. This, however, was not to be, as I got distracted by not only one but two—then three—other book projects, all thematically disconnected from and finished before this one. While I continued to give talks on distraction and boredom during the sabbatical leave and beyond, progress on the manuscript for this book was slow as it began to feel both overcooked and underdone, having been on the back burner too long for comfort. The saving grace came in the shape of Michael Petit discussing and thinking about the project with me, as well as editing some of it. So, thank you immensely, Chip. In a perfect world, this book would be coauthored.

I would also like to thank all those who have discussed this project in connection with the diverse talks I have given over the years, those who braved the avalanche of animated GIFs during my distraction talks, and especially those who knowingly invited me over: Johanna Sumiala for the 2015 Mediated Belongings Symposium at the University of Helsinki; André Jansson for the 2015 In the Flow ACSIS (Advanced Cultural Studies Institute in Sweden) conference in Norrköping; Jukka Tiusanen for the FINSSE (Finnish Society for the Study of English) 2015 conference at the University of Vaasa; Niels van Doorn and Helen Rutten for the 2015 Bland, Boring, Banal symposium at the University of Amsterdam; Tero Karppi for the 2016 PLASMA (Performances, Lectures, and Screenings in Media Art) lecture at SUNY Buffalo; Lisa Adkins and Mona Mannevuo for the 2016 Price workshop at the University of Turku; Judith Ackermann, Asko Lehmuskallio, and Tristan Thielmann for the 2016 Digital Practices conference at the University of Siegen; Catherine Driscoll and team for the 2016 Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference at the University of Sydney; Michael Liegl and team for the 2017 Loose Connections conference at the University of Hamburg; Zeena Felman, Alessandro Gandini, and Paolo Gerbaudo for the 2017 The Digital Everyday conference at King’s College London; Jonas Fritsch and Thomas Markussen for the 2018 Affects, Interfaces, Screens conference at Aarhus University; Martin Cloonan for the 2018 Failure symposium in Turku; Beckie Coleman for the 2019 Mediated Presents workshop at Goldsmiths College; and Raili Marling and Andra Siibak for the Troubling Gender: Theory and Method winter school at the University of Tartu in 2020. These events, and the discussions they made happen, not only kept the book project alive but crucially helped it move forward.

In addition to the 2015 Television & New Media article that forms the basis for chapter 2, research for this book has previously appeared as Fickle Focus: Distraction, Affect and the Production of Value in Social Media in First Monday Vol. 21, no. 10 (2016), a special issue on Economies of the Internet, edited by Kylie Jarrett and D. E. Wittkower; as Infrastructures of Intimacy in Mediated Intimacies: Connectivities, Relationalities, and Proximities, edited by Rikke Andreassen, Michael Nebeling Petersen, Katherine Harrison, and Tobias Raun (London: Routledge 2018); and as Affect, Data, Manipulation and Price in Social Media in Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Vol. 19, no. 2 (2018), a special issue on Price, edited by Lisa Adkins and Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen. In addition, a text critiquing nostalgia in media studies inquiry building on this book is forthcoming in a special issue on Mediating Presents coedited with Rebecca Coleman for Media Theory as Distracted Present, Golden Past. Many, many thanks to these editors for their feedback and support that helped me frame the project in novel ways. As always, I very much appreciate the labor that anonymous peer reviewers put into thinking through other people’s work: this work has been pivotal to how this project has gradually progressed. Thank you especially, reviewers 1, 2, and 3 of the articles and the book manuscript.

Finally, my heartfelt thanks to Caroline Bem, Ken Hillis, and Jenny Sundén for taking the time to read, discuss, and comment on this work. Jenny’s emotional and intellectual support when I was writing up the manuscript was invaluable, as was Ricky Barnes’s affective labor. I would also like to collectively thank the research team of the Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture consortium funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland (2019–2025) for thinking through themes central to this book with me and for making it possible to take the discussions further. Many thanks also to Caroline Bassett, Beckie Coleman, Andrew Herman, Tero Karppi, Mari Pajala, Laura Saarenmaa, Will Straw, and Jaakko Suominen for support and discussions that helped me find enthusiasm in the more somber registers of affect. Also, thanks to Lauren Berlant for serendipitous words of compositional solidarity—and, of course, Irina Shklovski for all the daily creepies.

1 Introduction: From Loss to Ambiguity

The scene, dear reader, is set for crisis. According to a plethora of cultural diagnoses, networked devices, apps, and social media services are atrophying our attention spans, eroding our capacity to focus and think, addicting us, boring us, and stealing our time, as well as stopping us from truly relating to one another, engaging in critical thought, or contributing to public life in a meaningful way. The prognosis, it is said, is poor: if things are currently bad, they are only getting worse.

These concerns are raised by a broad range of authors, from the journalist Nicholas Carr in the best-selling 2010 The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains to more careful scholarly analyses. Just consider this exhausting, albeit hardly exhaustive listing of diagnoses relevant to this book: Discussions of the accelerating speeds of media, culture, and society have come to abound, not least in connection with online connectivity (e.g., Adam 2003; Gleick 1999; Rosa 2013; Scheuerman 2003; Virilio 1995). The excessive and ever accelerating volume of stimuli rendered available in networked media is seen to result in sensory and cognitive overload, portrayed largely as a paralyzing force rendering extended or deep focus difficult, if not impossible, to achieve and sustain as attention merely floats and shifts from one digital impulse to another in anticipation of novelty (e.g., Andrejevic 2013; Crary 2014; McCullough 2013; Shenk 1997). Such perpetual quest for pleasurable dopamine hits, it is argued, is addictive and contributes to a neurological rewiring of the brain that impairs our ability to think, remember, be, and relate (Stjernfelt and Lauritzen 2019, 43–58). Some identify this as an addictive dynamic leading to a state of terminal (Anderson 2009) and chronic (Hassan 2012) distraction—or even to digital dementia (Spitzer 2012) and loss of cognitive capacity (e.g., Hassan 2014; see also O’Gorman 2015).

Jonathan Crary (2014, 34) sees the corrosion of memory functions resulting in mass amnesia sustained by the culture of global capitalism while Bernard Stiegler (2013, 96) argues that social media and accelerated consumer capitalism are destroying predigital social relations and paving the way to disorientation and ill-being (see also Stiegler 2009, 2012b; O’Gorman 2011, 462). Byung-Chul Han (2017) conceptualizes this as all-encompassing neoliberal psychopolitical exploitation and governance whereas yet other critics consider smart devices, social media, and mobile communications, rather than forms of production or monetization, as being to blame for corroding our capacities to deeply focus or process information (Carr 2010) and for hurting our relationships, family ties, and forms of sociability (Turkle 2012). Encapsulating and symbolizing these developments, social media in particular comes across as a toxic, punishing addiction machine (Seymour 2019).

Despite dramatic differences between these diagnoses—for their authors hardly agree on the overall significance, meaning, or direction of the developments that they address—they contribute to a broad, repetitive discourse of loss connected to networked media. For it is a narrative rule that a grim present, or indeed a grim future, requires a better state of affairs to be articulated against: a time when the things that are currently in crisis or already lost were still available is, by necessity, a past one. Douglas Coupland (2014) argues as much when spelling out the rationale of his 2012 poster slogan project I MISS MY PRE-INTERNET BRAIN:

I’m discombobulated this morning: I forgot my iPhone, so have that homesick, disconnected feeling you get when you realise you’re phoneless. … Time is moving too quickly these days—and yet, at the same time, it’s moving too slowly. And it’s not just that I’m growing older. Quite simply, my brain no longer feels the way it used to; my sense of time is distinctly different from what it once was, and I miss my pre-internet brain. The internet has burrowed inside my head and laid eggs, and it feels as though they’re all hatching.

Known for popularizing the term Generation X in the early 1990s, Coupland frames his project in terms of loss. He misses his pre-internet brain and the earlier tempo of life in which it thrived. The current one is both too fast and too slow, and it suffers from what he terms omniscience fatigue: Thanks to Google and Wikipedia, for the first time in the history of humanity, it’s possible to find the answer to almost any question, and the net effect of this is that information has become slightly boring. The abundance of information then results in something of a destructive maelstrom: Our attention spans are collapsing: we want movies; we want music; we want unfiltered information. … And we want it all now (Coupland 2014). Coupland’s project communicates longing for forms of experience that were available before ubiquitous networked connectivity took hold: for a time when the sense of time felt less warped, when attention spans were more sustained, when information took longer to acquire and therefore held more interest, when the imperative of immediacy had not yet come to govern, and when things felt less boring.

Google Images search results for I miss my pre-internet brain, https://www.google.com/search?q=I+miss+my+pre-internet+brain.

Adding to this narrative of loss with rhetorical flair, Geert Lovink (2019, 11–12) describes social media as generating boredom, anxiety, and despair. For him, the addictive apps we use are basically designed to make us sad while the thrills they promise eat away at our capacities to relate and live: As a result, we’re dead inside. We feel defeated, overwhelmed, stressed, anxious, nervous, stupid, silly, useless (Lovink 2019, 35). Hopelessly hooked, we stumble about in the world in sad, meaningless ways: There is the sense of worthlessness, blankness, joylessness, the fear of accelerating boredom, the feeling of nothingness, plain self-hatred while trying to get off drug dependency, those lapses of self-esteem … those moments of being overtaken by a sense of dread and alienation, up to your neck in crippling anxiety (Lovink 2019, 50). Dominic Pettman (2016, 121) further maps out the affective terrain of social media: Compulsion. Distraction. Procrastination. Addiction. The four courses of the apocalypse.

The current conjuncture may, then, seem bleak indeed—as may the very title of this book, Dependent, Distracted, Bored. The three affective formations examined here encapsulate the key argument repeated in narratives of loss connected to networked media: that we are hopelessly addicted to devices and apps that distract us to boredom. Focusing on addiction, distraction, and boredom as affective formations, I set out to explore a different narrative trajectory instead, one foregrounding ambiguity and contextual nuance over generalizations and reductive conclusions. While sharing the general premise running through the analyses addressed above—that media technologies are not mere instrumental tools for communication but shape our ways of sensing, being present in, and making sense of the world—this book steers clear of cultural pessimism and dystopian romanticism dwelling over, and lamenting, things lost, and refuses the fixity and firmness of the discursive templates that are most readily on offer. My aim is to make a critical intervention in how we imagine both the present and the past, and in how we conceptualize experiences and routines of everyday life in the context of ubiquitous connectivity. Moving away from binary divisions between dependence and agency, distraction and attention, boredom and enchantment, I foreground ambiguity and movement instead. Within the affective formations examined in this book, frustration and pleasure, dependence and sense of possibility, distraction and attention, boredom, interest, and excitement enmesh, oscillate, enable, and depend on one another.

Working with Ambiguity

Affect, as indicated in emojis and social media reaction buttons, or as diagnosed in zeitgeist analyses veering to the sad side, is routinely divided into the positive and the negative registers in ways implying that the good and the bad can be distinctly pried apart. A similar division between the positive (as that which we tend toward) and the negative (as that which we try to minimize or avoid) has meandered through affect inquiry ever since Baruch Spinoza’s seventeenth-century consideration of affectations as either increasing or diminishing the body’s power to exist and to act (Spinoza 1992; see also Paasonen 2018c, 41–42). When considered more closely, this was, however, never a binary, for the one and the same thing can be at the same time good and bad, and also indifferent (Spinoza 1992, 153). Following this line of thinking, the same object—be it a smart device, an app, an animated GIF, a hardcore porn clip, or a social media update—can result in virtually any kind of an affective encounter, and the ensuing affectations can be ambivalent indeed. An affective intensity that is enlivening (and in this sense positive) can come in all kinds of hues and be cut through by ripples that are far from enjoyable. Boredom, as flatness of feeling, may yield excitement as well as result in stupor, just as distractions can bore, fascinate, irritate, or enchant, possibly simultaneously so.

Starting from and working with ambiguity, Dependent, Distracted, Bored argues that cultural inquiry has to be able to hold seemingly contradictory things together in dynamic tension if it is to understand that which it studies with sufficient degrees of granularity. Holding on to irreconcilable tensions without the aim of resolving them makes it possible to grasp how things appearing to be diametrically opposed and mutually contradictory are in effect codependent, or give rise to one another (see also Bem 2019, 3, 22). Writing on contemporary dominant aesthetic categories, Sianne Ngai (2015, 19, 23) sees the interesting as feeding boredom, aggression and tenderness as intermingling in cuteness, and playfulness as fusing with desperation in zaniness. For Ngai (2015, 14), these aesthetic categories in fact characterize social media with its zany blogs, cute tweets, and interesting wikis. While Ngai’s project is distinctly different from the line of inquiry pursued here (her interest is in aesthetic categories, styles, and judgment and hence focuses on specific objects of analysis rather than on forms and dynamics of experience), her approach makes it possible to see everyday affect as equivocal, as made of mixed feelings, and as requiring forms of analysis capable of accommodating such ambiguity.

In order to work with ambiguity and irreconcilable tensions, I build on Jacques Derrida’s (1981, 1993) discussion of the pharmakon—namely, objects that can operate as both the poison and the cure, and which are fundamentally ambivalent in their potentialities, meanings, and uses: pharmakon is, to borrow Spinoza’s terms, good and bad, and also indifferent. The figure of the pharmakon—along with that of the pharmakos, scapegoat—weaves in and out of the following chapters that discuss how networked media is identified as locations of potentiality, as that which keeps potentialities from being actualized, and as that which can be blamed for a range of social developments. The pharmakon undoes binary division such as good or bad, the remedy and the toxin, the inside and the outside, and offers a productive analytical tool foregrounding complexity, cohabitation, and simultaneity instead. This makes it helpful in thinking through experiences of living with networked media beyond diagnoses lamenting the current moment as flat, lifeless, and pretty much doomed.

Dependent, Distracted, Bored asks how the culture of ubiquitous connectivity and data traffic is sensed and made sense of, remaining wary of how critiques of networked media risk being both simplifying and totalizing either because of their level of generalization or because of their disinterest toward how things are felt and lived with. All kinds of elementary differences among human subjects, routines of technology use, bodily abilities, identity markers, social attachments, political passions and actions disappear in overarching analyses of the current socio-technological moment. As the structural level of the macro is highlighted at the expense of the micro, contextual nuances, contradictions, and ambiguities—the very stuff that this book sets out to explore—fade from view. Yet as Kathleen Stewart (2007) argues, ordinary affects form contact zones on which everyday lives, both social and personal, take shape: potentiality emerges from the mundane.

If one is to take to heart the argument running through this book, that transformations in media technology—always tied to economic and political frameworks—are intimately connected to available ways of thinking, acting in, understanding, and feeling out the world, then one also has to consider the option that these transformations can be ambivalent, not always toward the worse for all involved, and not easy at all to pin down in their social ramifications. Networked media can contribute to greater social equality in the form of information resources, historical references, social connections, or, simply, add to enjoyment taken in by life through diversions catering to one’s specific niche desires. At the same time, it builds on exploitative working practices, causes broad environmental harm, and fuels monetization, commodification, and affective manipulation within data capitalism, the effects of which are far from equalizing, democratic, or transparent (West 2019).

In his discussion of social media, Pettman (2016, xi, 123) sees it as allowing for escapes from paying attention to the unhappy state of the world—for burying one’s head in the digital sand, so to speak. As an addictive cure or new opium for the masses, social media, for Pettman (2016, x), dulls the pain. Writing on the addictive, seductive rhythms of Twitter, journalist Richard Seymour (2019) chimes in: The user has already dropped out of work, a boring lunch or an anxious social situation to enter into a different, timeless zone. What we do on the Twittering Machine has as much to do with what we are avoiding as what we find when we log in—which, after all, is often not that exciting. While such accounts identify social media as a site of escape, for many, platforms like Twitter are key sources of knowledge concerning the world: from news headlines to petitions, to personal witness accounts, to event invitations, to heated debates, and beyond. Social media—even including the hegemonic data giant, Facebook—play diverse roles in and for social activism, horizontal self-organization, and the formation of affective publics, from political uprisings (Papacharissi 2015) to the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements (Garza