[Commlist] CfP: The Analogue Idyll: Disconnection, Detox and Departure from the Digital World

Please find below the details for the one-day symposium 'The Analogue 
Idyll', to be held at the University of Winchester on 7 July 2020.

*Deadline for abstracts: 16 April 2020*



*The Analogue Idyll: Disconnection, Detox and Departure from the Digital 
World*


Life’s better connected. So say today’s global media and 
telecommunications conglomerates.Yet, while government policy 
papers, development discourses,pop science articles and big 
techadvertising campaigns recurrently extol the virtues of digital 
connectivity, the last decade has seen a rising tide of digital 
discontent in the global north. Amidst proliferating public fears about 
dataveillance, social media addiction and vanishing forms of pre-digital 
sociality, a mounting sense of unease has surfaced around the material 
practices and cultural imperatives of constant connectivity.

/The Analogue Idyll /is a one-day symposium (7 July 2020) hosted by 
theCulture-Media-Text Research Centre 
<https://www.winchester.ac.uk/research/understanding-society-culture-and-the-arts/culture-media-text-research-centre/><https://www.winchester.ac.uk/research/understanding-society-culture-and-the-arts/culture-media-text-research-centre/>at 
the University of Winchester. The symposium will investigate narratives, 
representations, practices and imaginaries of digital disconnection and 
offlinism in contemporary social life. This event will bring together 
scholars from across the social sciences, arts and humanities who are 
working on topics that broadly engage or intersect with the theme of 
‘the analogue idyll’. The concept of the analogue idyll draws on and 
expands the imaginative efficacy of the rural idyll. More than simply 
demarcating a spatial division between the rural and urban, encapsulated 
within the myth of the rural idyll is the notion of the rural as a 
repository for ways of life regarded as simpler, slower-paced and more 
rewarding, natural, authentic, meaningful and healthy. While the rural 
idyll has long provided diverse social groups with a means to express 
broader concerns about temporality, technology, identity and progress, 
many of the positive values that were once accorded to this variant of 
the idyll are now being attributed to the analogue. Standing in for ‘the 
offline’, the ‘pre-digital’ or ‘non-computerised’, the analogue is 
quickly accruing meaning and value in a sociocultural milieu that is 
overwhelmingly digital.

This symposium welcomes a broad range of papers from across the 
disciplines that use various methodological techniques, theoretical 
traditions and analytic approaches to explorethe efficacy and valence of 
theanalogue as a new idyll myth.The aim of this symposium is to bring 
scholars working on topics related to digital disconnection, unplugging 
and offlinism together in order to stimulate fresh insights into the 
shifting relationship between humans and technology in digital modernity.

Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

  * National days of unplugging or user narratives of going offline
  * Digital detox retreats/digital fasting/Internet-free holiday
    packages/rehabilitation programmes
  * Pledges to #GoGadgetFree
  * Pre-digital nostalgia and sociality
  * The resurgence in popularity of analogue media forms (vinyl records,
    polaroid cameras, feature phones)
  * The new values being attributed to nondigital goods, services and
    lifestyles
  * The arbitrariness of the analogue/digital binary as new hybrid
    cyber-physical entities emerge
  * No-Fi/smartphone-free spaces
  * Behaviour-correcting practices related to digital technologies (e.g.
    phone stacking, device-free dinners)
  * Internet-blocking apps (e.g. Freedom, Cold Turkey, Anti Social)
  * Public health discourses forming around digital technologies (e.g.
    social media addiction, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the health
    effects of long-term exposure to Wi-Fi/mobile signals, the impact of
    self-illuminating screens on human sleep patterns)
  * Offlinism in the workplace (e.g. device-free team-building events,
    the slow email movement)

Proposals for 20-minute presentations should consist of:

  * Presenter’s name and title
  * Presenter’s affiliation
  * Presenter’s email
  * The title of the talk
  * 200-300 word abstract
  * 5 keywords
  * 50-100 word presenter bio

Proposals should be sent to the organiser, Alexander Taylor 
((alexander.taylor /at/ winchester.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(alexander.taylor /at/ winchester.ac.uk)>) by midnight on the 16 April 
2020. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 23 April 2020. 
Following the symposium we plan to publish selected papers as an edited 
collection in book form.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A30qPvkoNSY

Analogue Idyll Symposium, University of Winchester, 7 July 2020 - 
YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A30qPvkoNSY>
www.youtube.com
The Analogue Idyll is a one-day symposium (7 July 2020) hosted by the 
Culture-Media-Text Research Centre at the University of Winchester. The 
symposium will ...





<https://www.extreme-anthropology.com/single-post/2017/01/12/JEA-Journal-of-Extreme-Anthropology>---

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