Contribution short abstract:

Popular discourses on digital media practices are often entrenched in psychologized and apolitical frameworks ascribing labels of addiction and deficiencies to marginalized youths. I argue that the ethnographic research on mundane digital practices erodes spectacular narratives of digitalization.

Contribution long abstract:

Popular narratives on digital media practices are often entrenched in psychologized and apolitical frameworks that ascribe reductionist labels of addiction and deficiencies to digital practices of marginalized youths in particular. I argue that the ethnographic research on mundane and apparently banal digital practices, such as “mindless” scrolling through social media feeds, erodes spectacular narratives of digitalization. In my ethnographic study into Viennese youth centers in 2018 and 2019, I linked polemicized design practices, such as erasing effort and enabling flow, with the everyday struggles of marginalized youths faced with chronic boredom and a crisis of agency. Insights from the fieldwork suggest that digital practices, such as infinite scrolling, represent a social pulse against the backdrop of chronic boredom, as much as they cement boredom. Furthermore, what often lingers underneath arguments solely focusing on addiction and digital literacy, are the assumptions that the time spent online in an apparently “mindless” and inefficient manner is inherently problematic. Such approaches further marginalize youths, who are faced with extended periods of unemployment, waiting, and boredom and have few alternatives to pass the time. Hence, psychological anthropology can reintroduce ethnographic and critical complexity to psychological frameworks that remove the individuals from their social and political context and test insular aspects of “being online”, while implying causal relationships between psychological phenomena, such as boredom, anxiety, and depression on the one hand, and digital media technologies on the other.