Non-use scholars: Consider submitting to my open panel at 4S for next year’s conference:
Beyond Non-Use: Infrastructuralism and Interruption
Nathanael Bassett, University of Illinois at Chicago
This panel calls for scholarship on non-use and media refusal to examine how ubiquitous technology becomes infastrucutral, and the increasing difficulty of avoiding adoption. While existing works on non-use examine Sally Wyatt’s refuser, resister, and the expelled as well as the excluded, looking at technologies and media as infrastructural leads us to consider non-use as a precarious near-impossibility. Yet interruptions in patterns of use and changes in user behaviors emerge, as we negotiate our relationships with media and technology in context-specific studies. How do we consider what it is to be a non-user when innovation is rapidly the conditions of possibility for living in a technified society? This panel hopes to address that question.
Scholarship on non-use is welcome to examine the issues surrounding innovation, interruptions, (dis)engagement and (dis)empowerment. When we are compelled to participate in media and technology via innovation, how do we measure the exchange of agency, as ways of being in society become technified, commercialized and standardized on new platforms? What is the interuption to older ways of being and historic social infastructure? What is the relationship between (dis)engagements and (dis)empowerment? Case studies, theoretical works, and new perspectives are especially welcome as we try and continue the necessary conversation around non-use.
To submit a presentation to my panel, please visit https://www.4s2019.org/accepted-open-panels/
MrLiterati 