A digital backlash or just exhaustion and symptom management? KristofferAlbris, KarinFast, FaltinKarlsen, AnneKaun, StineLomborg& TrineSyvertsen(Eds.)The Digital Backlash and the Paradoxes of DisconnectionNordicom2024ISBN: 978-91-88855-95-4389 pa

The Digital Backlash is a run-of-the-mill edited volume on digital disconnection and its sociocultural ramifications, a theme that has received considerable attention in recent years (Helsper, 2021; Jansson & Adams, 2021;Miyake & Kuntsman, 2022).The book presents the palpable sense of unease surrounding digital media use as a digital backlash, a new "cultural zeitgeist", thereby stepping up the previous designations of ongoing mediatisation in terms of the disconnection turn, exhaustion, post-digital and alike.Structured by four parts on discourse and disputes, work, youth and recreation, the total of eighteen chapters aim to flesh out the paradoxes of digital disconnection in empirical detail.Chapters two to four revisit pivotal political events and cultural incidents surrounding the social media frenzy, namely the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, a divisive reception of mobile phone boxes or phone jails in Sweden and the dramatized documentary The Social Dilemma.Chapter five tackles the role of pop neuroscience in inadvertently fueling the very moral panics surrounding media addiction it promises to remedy, while chapter six overviews the decade of disconnection research and sketches its future agenda.The arguments developed in these chapters moderate the significance of these cultural-political events in their own right and present them as outcomes foreshadowed by preceding discourses and social trends.The rise of mindfulness and self-help movements, digital detox camps and the demands of the digital attention economy, more broadly, cannot be fully understood without taking into account the gradual normalization and individuation of responsibility over the increasing media load in our daily lives.In this context, notable is Forsler et al. 's argument that its neglect of the media effects tradition spells a lost opportunity for critical media studies to expose social and political factors over and above popularized, yet reductive brain-based explanations offered by neuroscience.