IIPC Debate 111, Wed 21 April, 5:15 pm (online, zoom-info below)
Dependent, distracted, bored: Affective formations in networked media
Professor Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku)
According to a dominant narrative repeated in journalistic and academic accounts for more than a decade, we are addicted to the digital devices, apps, and sites designed to distract us, which drive us to boredom and harm our capacities to focus, relate, remember, and be. Focusing on three affective formations — dependence, distraction, and boredom — as key to understanding both the landscape of contemporary networked media and the concerns connected to it, this talk challenges the dominant narrative and argues for the centrality of accounting for complexity and ambiguity instead. Dependence and agency, distraction and attention, boredom and excitement can be seen as dynamics that enmesh, oscillate, enable, and depend on one another — and, in some instances, cannot be told apart.
The debate is based on the book, Dependent, Distracted, Bored, out on April 20 with MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/dependent-distracted-bored
Susanna Paasonen is a Finnish feminist scholar. She is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku, and was a visiting scholar at MIT in 2016. She gained her PhD from the University of Turku in 2002; her dissertation was on gender and the popularization of the internet, which was later published through Peter Lang. After holding positions at the universities of Tampere, Jyväskylä and Helsinki, Paasonen was appointed Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku on 1 August 2011, and publishes on internet research, media theory, sexuality, pornography and affect.
Topic: IIPC Debate
Time: Apr 21, 2021 05:15 PM Helsinki
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