Seminar April 12: The Return of Analog — Exploring practices of technology non-use and digital disconnect

 Claes Thorén, who defended his doctoral dissertation at Karlstad University in the spring of 2014 now returns to give seminar on his recent research. Since his disputation, he has worked as a researcher and later as a senior lecturer and director of studies at Uppsala University. (The seminar will be held in English.)

The past decade has witnessed a drastic increase in digitization of various aspects of society, culminating in the arrival of ubiquitous computing where the material world itself is folded into an expansive “Internet of things”. Omnipresent digital services such as Spotify, Netflix and eBay have transformed the consumption of material goods into digital services augmented by seamless, mobile connectivity and social media. Meanwhile, seemingly obsolete, analog technologies are currently enjoying a minor renaissance in spite of more efficient and omnipresent digital alternatives. The Economist published an article in 2016 proclaiming the return of the vinyl record as well as the steadily increasing sales of printed books. In November 2015, Amazon – the symbol of the inevitable death of traditional book merchants – opened its first physical bookshop in Seattle. These examples seem to spell out a willing disconnect or departure from aspects of digital society that may signal that we as individuals are not so quick to altogether discard the analog for the digital.
 
This presentation sets out explore the phenomenon of willing digital disconnect by reconsidering and reworking some of the central ideas that currently fall under the umbrella of technological non-use. Conventionally non-use of technology has been understood and framed using the rather binary concept of the digital divide where non-use is conceptualized as stemming from lack or deficit, drawing a line in the sand between digital haves and have-nots. Normative responses to such “lack” tend to designate non-users as individuals that should either be assimilated into modern technological users, or be dismissed as outliers and ignored. The presupposition of binary divisions between the dichotomies “users”-“non-users” and “analog”-“digital” are put into question as the presentation explores the taking up of pre-digital technologies and practices, and the explicit or implicit disengagement from contemporary digital technologies.

Date: 2017-APRIL-12
Time: 15:15-17:00
Room: 1A349

References
Thorén, C., Edenius, M., Eriksson Lundström, J. and Kitzmann, A. (Forthcoming 2017), “The Hipster’s Dilemma – What is Analog or Digital in the Post-Digital Society?”, Convergence, Forthcoming
Edenius, M., Eriksson Lundström, J. and Thorén, C. (2016), “There is (too much) pragmatics in non-use – to be pragmatic about it – A short investigation of classical pragmatism from a non-use perspective”, AIS SIGPRAG Pre-ICIS Workshop.
Thorén, C. and Kitzmann, A. (2015), “Replicants, imposters and the real deal: Issues of non-use and technology resistance in vintage and software instruments”, First Monday, Vol. 20 No. 11.