Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media

A new approach to understanding the culture of ubiquitous connectivity, arguing that our dependence on networked infrastructure does not equal addiction.

In this book, Susanna Paasonen takes on a dominant narrative repeated in journalistic and academic accounts for more than a decade: that we are addicted to devices, apps, and sites designed to distract us, that drive us to boredom, with detrimental effect on our capacities to focus, relate, remember, and be. Paasonen argues instead that network connectivity is a matter of infrastructure and necessary for the operations of the everyday. Dependencies on it do not equal addiction but speak to the networks within which our agency can take shape.

Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland, and the author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography and the coauthor of NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media and Who's Laughing Now: Feminist Tactics in Social Media, all published by the MIT Press.