Platform Dis/Connection Practices and their Tensions in the Global South. A Conversation with Emiliano Treré

Abstract

This interview explores the research agenda of Emiliano Treré on activists digital disconnection practices and resistance to algorithms and social datafication in different latitudes. It takes his expert opinion on the cross-cutting continuums and tensions between the individual/ collective and the practical/strategic in the field. The conversation begins by querying whether the analysis of these practices and resistance is a new field of study, or an aspect within the study of social movements or social communication. The author raises a series of problematic intersections between disconnection and contentions from other literatures such as rational choice, mental health, climate action, and uses and gratifications, among others. Furthermore, Treré provides disconnection with a status of human agency in relation to the socioeconomic, psychological and environmental damages of current hyperconnectivity, in order to avoid considering it as a correctable anomaly and relate it more deeply to social discontent. Finally, the interview contextualizes these reflections in the Global South, where conscious resistance to social datafication is confronted by precariousness and lack of access to stable connectivity, and its meaning for social movements.