Beyond Non-Use: Infrastructuralism and Interruption

Abstract

This panel calls for scholarship on non-use and media refusal to examine how ubiquitous technology becomes infrastructural, 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 setting 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 interruption to older ways of being and historic social infrastructure? 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.

Individual Presentations

• Comparative Reflection on Do Not Track as Non-Use - Meg Leta Jones, Georgetown University; Jenny Lee, CCT Georgetown University

• Hacking and Non-Use: Infrastructural Modifications and Epistemic Engagement - Sebastian Dahm, TU Berlin

• Rural Broadband: Telecom Haves, Have Nots and Will Nots - Helen Hambly, University of Guelph

• Process This!: Processed World's Aesthetics of Resistance - Joseph DeLeon, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Medium Control, Maximum Empowerment: Strategies for Amish Living in the Digital Age - Lindsay Ems, Butler University

• Reverse Geo-Coding for Local Context: Working with GPS Non-Use in Nairobi - Elizabeth Resor, UC Berkeley School of Information

Session Organizer

• Nathanael Bassett, University of Illinois at Chicago