Disconnect: Facebook's Affective Bonds

by Tero Karppi

An urgent examination of the threat posed to social media by user disconnection, and the measures websites will take to prevent it

No matter how pervasive and powerful social media websites become, users always have the option of disconnecting — right? Not exactly, as Tero Karppi reveals in this disquieting book. Pointing out that platforms like Facebook see disconnection as an existential threat — and have undertaken wide-ranging efforts to eliminate it — Karppi argues that users’ ability to control their digital lives is gradually dissipating. 

Taking a non-human-centric approach, Karppi explores how modern social media platforms produce and position users within a system of coded relations and mechanisms of power. For Facebook, disconnection is an intense affective force. It is a problem of how to keep users engaged with the platform, but also one of keeping value, attention, and desires within the system. Karppi uses Facebook’s financial documents as a map to navigate how the platform sees its users. Facebook’s plans to connect the entire globe through satellites and drones illustrates the material webs woven to keep us connected. Karppi analyzes how Facebook’s interface limits the opportunity to opt-out — even continuing to engage users after their physical death. Showing how users have fought to take back their digital lives, Karppi chronicles responses like Web2.0 Suicide Machine, an art project dedicated to committing digital suicide. 

For Karppi, understanding social media connectivity comes from unbinding the bonds that stop people from leaving these platforms. Disconnection brings us to the limit of user policies, algorithmic control, and platform politics. Ultimately, Karppi’s focus on the difficulty of disconnection, rather than the ease of connection, reveals how social media has come to dominate human relations.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology

192 pages, Paperback

Published October 16, 2018

About the author

Tero Karppi is a Finnish-born new media scholar. In his work Karppi focuses on disconnections in social media and network culture.

Karppi is interested in understanding our culture of connectivity through different platforms and their operations – especially when they fail – and puts emphasis on the non-human actors and agencies involved. Thus he tries to challenge and find alternatives for models that aim to explain social media through user participation. More broadly his research interests include media theory, new and digital media, social media, algorithms, digital economy and affect theory.

In his writings Karppi has explored different social media platforms and mechanisms of extracting value out of users. He has analyzed social media related phenomena such as digital suicide, dead Facebook users and online trolls. Recently he has been interested in the relation between Twitter and financial markets. Karppi’s research has been published in journals such as Theory Culture & Society, Fibreculture, Culture Machine and Transformations and his work has been featured in the Boston Globe, Buzzfeed, the German version of Wired, and number of Finnish news outlets such as Helsingin Sanomat and YLE News. Karppi has worked as a researcher at the University of Turku, and at the Game Research Laboratory, University of Tampere, Finland. He was also a Social Media Collective PhD intern at Microsoft Research.