Logged out: Analyzing Non-Participation in the Internet by Jason Abellaneda Baguia
Abstract
Participation in the multimedia and Web 3.0 era has been theorized, leading to models like Nico Carpentier’s (2011) access, interaction, and participation (AIP) that is oft-debated in communication discourse. There is evidence, however, of human movement towards non-participation that occurs with, alternately to, or after media-aided participation. Investigating this is crucial to holistic theorizing of media use and non-use and of human connection to and disconnection from the internet. Through theories like social shaping of technology and motivational theory, and using content analyses of purposively sampled textual accounts of disconnection from the web, this study parses motivations for and goals of voluntary human disconnection from the Web. They range from the therapeutic to the artistic and serve as grounds for a model of non-participation that the researcher draws from interdisciplinary concepts such as personhood, intentionality, and Kulturkritik. The new model broadens horizons towards empirically-grounded understandings of mediated communication and of the interaction between human beings with communication technologies.
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