Dear friends and colleagues, I write to invite you to an online talk this Thursday, called Quitting Digital Culture: Rethinking Agency in a Beyond-Choice Ontology. The talk is part of the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill)’s Digital Aesthetics: Critique, Creativity and Selfhood in Computational Culture series. Full details below. It would be a joy to see you there! Warmest, Zeena Quitting Digital Culture: Rethinking Agency in a Beyond-Choice Ontology Zeena Feldman (King’s College London) Thursday, 9 December at 15:00-16:30 GMT (10:00-11.30am EST) The event is free but registration is required. Sign-up at https://forms.gle/NqUU9igLtfCZGWvW7. About the talk: Life in the UK has reached peak digital. Social media and smartphones are everywhere. Such pervasive connectivity may have its benefits but it also has no shortage of critics. Yet beyond pure condemnation (or celebration), how can we make sense of the mediated, always-on lives many of us lead? And how can we understand the varied practices of digital disconnection that operate within this technosocial moment of hyperconnectivity? This talk analyses connection and disconnection together and in relation in order to more fully understand the paradoxes and ambivalences of today’s connectivity culture. Empirically, it is grounded in findings from my Quitting Social Media project: a three-year, mixed-methods exploration of how people in the UK and further afield have navigated this historical moment of social media and smartphone hegemony. What emerges is a practically and affectively complex portrait of life with the digital, which I argue necessitates a radical rethinking of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’. About the speaker: Zeena Feldman is Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where she runs the Quitting Social Media project. Her interdisciplinary research examines the relationship between digital technologies and everyday life. She has published widely, including on the sharing economy, online communities, queer visual culture, digital detox and mental health apps. She is co-editor, with Deborah Lupton, of Digital Food Cultures (Routledge, 2020) and editor of Art & the Politics of Visibility (IB Tauris, 2017).