Abstract:

Would you be able to live without internet, mobile and other digital technologies during 3 to 7 days? This challenge was made to undergraduate students from Communication Sciences and Sound Sciences of University Lusófona in Portugal, who were asked to produce a written report and short video to document their experience of digital disconnection, during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, which took place from November 2020 and January 2021. To challenge undergraduate students to disconnect from digital and to be auto-ethnographers had as main objective to promote their self-reflection on their use of digital communication technologies.

The quality of most of the written reports and videos produced by these students led to this presentation proposal, which are the departure point for a small scale exploratory project that could be further expanded in the near future. Drawing on the data already submitted by the students – written reports and short videos -, the overarching research question for an exploratory study is how did a small sample of undergraduate students experienced a brief period of digital disconnection during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic?

The secondary questions are the following:
a) how did these students spent their time during the days in which they were voluntarily digitally disconnected?
b) what benefits they self-reported from being disconnected from digital technologies?
c) what set-backs or down-sides of being digital disconnected did they self-reported?
d) what was the biggest take-out from the experience to these students?

About the methodology, the auto-ethnography assignment was inspired by the method of forced disruption designed by Kaun & Schwarzenegger (2014), in which the participants were asked to be off-line for 1 week and to document their experience. It should be noted that, these Portuguese students could also choose to deliver a quick and dirty ethnographic study, with at least two participants, or they could also choose to write critical review on the subject of deep mediatization and digital disconnection.

This small exploratory project focused on a specific moment: the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Portugal. During the mandatory lockdown periods, most people had their daily activities disrupted - and their media use, as well, one might add. The concept of deep mediatization (Hepp & Hasebrink, 2018) can be useful to understand this almost dramatic re-enforcement of media presence in people’s lives in advanced capitalist countries.

However, if deep mediatization may be on the rise, one can speculate that as we adapt to the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps also is increasing the desire to disconnect from media - or from digital, in a broader sense. The concept of digital disconnection (Woodstock, 2016) and related terms such as digital detox, digital dieting, digital fasting, unplugging, cord-cutting - brings to the forefront several critical issues in the diverse ways people currently engage and disengage with media. In this presentation, several of these critical issues are to be addressed and presented, by young people themselves, in their own terms and with their own images.

Keywords:

Digital disconnection, digital detox, deep mediatization, auto-ethnography, covid-19 pandemic.