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Paper Short Abstract:

Even though offline-online distinctions analytically blur together, this dualism still holds relevance in everyday live. Drawing on empirical research in digital detox camps, this paper investigates how different human and more-than-human entities assemble to create offline spaces.

Paper Abstract:

As has been pointed out by Digital Anthropology, as well as in this CfP, current everyday lives are characterized by digitalization, which by now has become a ubiquitous, normalized and inconspicuous backdrop of many socio-cultural practices. However, over the last decade there has been increasing public debates about and criticism of digital technologies and media, as well as imperatives of networking and so called ‘always on’. This critique, often subsumed under digital detox, calls to spend more time offline, to be present in the moment and to find a more balanced way of handling digital media and communication technologies.

Drawing on ethnographic research in digital detox camps, this paper seeks to map and understand how actors, materialities, practices, bodies and socio-technical imaginaries of disconnection assemble to constitute offline spaces. The ethnographic material – namely fieldnotes and interviews – stems from my ongoing PhD research located in Germany and Austria.

By employing a relational concept of space (Fuller & Löw, 2017), this paper argues that these offline spaces are only forming against the backdrop of digitalization criticism, and therefore, always point towards popular conceptions of the digital. I understand the camps as a form of dreamscapes, where the online-offline dualism alongside other dualisms like nature-culture are reinforced. By highlighting a bodily and sensory mode of experience, which is created in the camps, actors negotiate what it means to be authentically human in contrast to their everyday lives, which are seen as entangled with digital technologies and ambient media.