Locational Technologies in Post-disaster Infrastructure Space

Drawing on research carried out in Haiti from 2010 to 2013, this chapter considers how mobile communication infrastructures and locational technologies are enrolled into uneven global assemblages of power that may have more, or less, democratizing effects depending on how they are performed. The takeoff of digital humanitarianism using platforms such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) was built upon idealistic beliefs in the power of open data and locational media. However, the inclusivity of digital communication is fragile, and disconnection arises even as organizations and individuals attempt to facilitate connection. This analysis of locational technologies in post-earthquake Haiti considers how humanitarian aid and post-disaster recovery processes might be improved by first recognizing the uneven topologies of accessibility within communication infrastructures; and second by building on local appropriations of connectivity within everyday life to envision and enact patchwork connections across diverse communication platforms, as well as strategic disconnections.

Introduction

Disconnection is a research topic that attracts increasing amounts of attention. However, there is a lack of research on how different forms of disconnection are related to the production of space and place. This chapter introduces the volume Disentangling: The Geographies of Digital Disconnection, which gathers 12 chapters from different disciplines. Bringing together key insights from the chapters, this introduction overviews the research terrain and presents an agenda for research into the geographies of digital disconnection. It discusses (1) the power geometries of (dis)connection; (2) the existential issues stemming from digitally entangled lives, and (3) how the ambiguities of (dis)connection are accentuated and exposed in time-spaces of social disruption (e.g., during the COVID-19 pandemic). The chapter also proposes disentangling as a complementary term for contextualizing issues of (dis)connection from a social and spatial perspective. Disentangling is ultimately a matter of rethinking and reworking the entangling force of connective media.

Retreat Culture and Therapeutic Disconnection

Digital detox retreats, mindfulness retreats, yoga and health retreats, nature and wilderness retreats, the me-retreat. Within our current culture of connectivity to go on a retreat as a way to reduce stress and improve one’s quality of life by temporarily disconnecting from our everyday (media) environments has been a growing trend. While generally conceived to be beneficial to the well-being of those who partake in it, retreat culture has also been criticized (in public and scholarly discourse alike) for feeding into the neoliberal program of privatizing solutions to what are, in fact, social problems. Here, the retreat reveals itself to be part of a disciplining leisure industry that parasitizes on our need to disconnect. Expanding on this controversy, this chapter probes the retreat as an un/critical imaginary that discloses some of the cracks in our existing reality, opening up a transitional space in which change may take place.

Disconnection and Reconnection as Resistance to Geosurveillance

Digital media has spawned entire industries centered on geosurveillance, resulting in complex flows of sensitive data. Practices surrounding the collection, use, and sale of this data are commonly concealed behind lengthy privacy policies riddled with legal jargon and devoid of technical specificity. Simultaneously, new methods of analysis tease out information from even “anonymized” data. As a result, it increasingly seems that the only reliable shelter from geosurveillance is to disconnect, but how difficult is this in practice, is it worth pursuing, and how might we do so? This chapter examines these questions. It first outlines several conceptualizations of privacy and establishes what is at stake every time privacy is eroded. It then overviews the many mechanisms that can produce geospatial data, illustrating the ubiquity of geosurveillance and difficulty of disconnection. Finally, and despite this difficulty, it discusses tactics for resistance, demonstrating that modern privacy requires not just disconnection, but reconnection.

Disconnection as Distinction

Disconnecting from digital media is often mentioned in the public debate as a way of improving quality of life, productivity, sustainability, and so forth. However, not everyone can afford to disconnect, and media morality varies across social space. Based on data from a national Swedish survey (2019), this chapter applies correspondence analysis and a Bourdieusian theoretical framework to chart the extent to which different social groups prioritize disconnecting in different places, and the forms of digital unease associated with smartphone use. Such preferences are mapped onto a social space constructed around the distribution of economic and cultural capital in Swedish society, also illuminating how disconnection practices correspond to other lifestyle practices. The analysis reveals that the handling of digital (dis)connection (in different places) plays into overarching patterns of taste and cultural distinction. As such, disconnection manifests as an emerging moral-symbolic battleground in affluent societies.

Automating Digital Afterlives

The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.

Digital Disconnection as Othering

Digital disconnection is often considered a necessary condition for “authentic” experience of difference. However, this discourse others not only those whose lives are “authentically” experienced, but also those who thrive on digital connection. Three cases illustrate this effect. First, the discourse of immersion prevalent in study abroad encourages students to “live like the locals”—“authentically”—by forgoing cell phones and the Internet. Second, educational farms provided college students on alternative break trips with simulations of life in poverty through digital disconnection to cultivate empathy toward them. Although meant to eliminate distraction, the digital disconnection in both cases also linked the life of Cultural Others and people in poverty with digital disconnection, othering them. Third, frictions on another alternative break trip pitted mainstream “outdoorsy” students seeking digital disconnection for “authentic” nature experience against “non-outdoorsy” students who enjoyed nature while digitally connected. This chapter investigates the othering effects of the discourse of digital disconnection and suggests ways to learn about difference with digital connectivity.

Senses and Sensors of Sleep

This chapter analyzes sleep technology products designed to mediate and modulate patterns of sleep. Products analyzed include sleep-tracking applications and wearable devices for customizing personal phases of sleep architecture, and “smart” bedroom systems that use sensors and Internet connectivity to monitor and automate sensory environments to optimize the architectural spaces of sleep. Drawing on theories of digital disconnection, this chapter highlights how historical and theoretical notions of sleep as a site of subjective, social, and technological disconnection are reworked by contemporary media technologies. The now ubiquitous use of smartphones in bed reflects ongoing demands for digital participation and productivity. Yet such arrangements are unevenly distributed, with disconnective sleep technologies operating as a form of privilege and distinction for those who have the resources to reshape the architectures of personal sleep rhythms and spaces.

Networked Intimacies

This chapter zooms in on transformations of intimacy and relational spaces in a time of a viral, global crisis. Set against the backdrop of “social distancing” practices, the chapter opens with a discussion of digital intimacy, focusing on the layering of anxiety and anticipation within networked connectivity. Secondly, it moves on to discuss how such anticipatory anxiety may become punctuated by pleasure and joy. Considering the dynamics between physical disconnection and digital intensity within pandemic hookup practices, it explores in particular instances of quarantine humor in queer hookup cultures. This humor stems from impossibly contradictory spaces of self-isolation, desire, and longing, in relation to which the swiftness of the swipe is transformed into a disconnect in the shape of a delay. The chapter ends with an example of Swedish, queer quarantine humor and a discussion of partial disconnections, or selective connectivity in difficult times in the interest of self-care.

Paradoxes of Disconnected Connection

Normal academic life is a series of gatherings. The COVID-19 outbreak in spring of 2020 disrupted these gatherings and constituted not just a health crisis but also a profound alteration of academic life. Social distancing and quarantine accelerated historic processes of distanciation, as an increasing number of social situations were lifted out of the places in which they would have occurred. Teaching, learning, mentoring, and collaborating continued to “take place” but these newly mediated connections included experiences of disconnection. Auto-ethnography conducted by six academics at various levels during the COVID pandemic explores questions of space, place, pedagogy, and scholarship, comparing and contrasting our varied vantage points on transformations of spatial routines, the learning process, the academic community, and our lives. We show how disconnected connection was experienced differently, by differently-situated social actors, each of whom appropriated certain media according to his or her wants and needs.