Keynote lecture by Dr Esperanza Miyake: Disengaging to buy Slow Time? Glamour, Labour, and the Politics of Deceleration in the Age of Compulsory Digitality
Is digital disengagement free?
Who can afford slow time?
What happens when we re-engage?
From digital detoxes, screentime apps to disconnection days, we are increasingly offered opportunities to engage in digital disengagement. We have even reached a point where employers and consumer culture are actively embracing and promoting digital disengagement as part of health and wellbeing. In such a neoliberal context of compulsory digital dis/engagement, what are the implications of engaging in digital disengagement?
Based on a decade of research on digital disengagement (predominantly with long-term collaborator, A Kuntsman), Miyake will explore the phenomenon of conscious digital disengagement, questioning the tensions that arise between disengagement as a form of active resistance based on a politics of refusal, and as a co-opted commodity used to regulate, monetise and even penalise people in ways that further embed them within the wider system of digital and algorithmic capitalism. In the process of the discussion, Miyake will examine how digital disengagement in itself is also a privilege and a luxury – only available to those with the right currency. The talk will ultimately politicise, problematise, celebrate and interrogate digital dis/engagement, opting out and deceleration in the digital age.
Dr Esperanza Miyake is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Media and Communications, and the Chair of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Committee at the Department of the Humanities, University of Strathclyde. Miyake has published numerous books and articles in the area of Digital and Internet Studies. Her latest monograph is entitled, Virtual Influencers: digital identity in the age of multiple realities (Routledge, 2024).