Interface Frictions

How Digital Debility Reshapes Our Bodies

AvNeta Alexander

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

Del i serien Sign, Storage, Transmission

1 355 kr

Beställningsvara. Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar. Fri frakt över 249 kr.

Fler format och utgåvor

Häftad

316 kr

E-bok

472 kr

Beskrivning

In Interface Frictions, Neta Alexander explores how ubiquitous design features in digital platforms reshape, condition, and break our bodies. She shows that while features such as refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and night mode are convenient, they can lead to “digital debility”—the slow and often invisible ways that technologies may harm human bodies. These features all assume an able-bodied user and at the same time push users to ignore their bodily limitations like the need for rest, nourishment, or movement. Building on the lived experiences of people with disabilities, Alexander explores alternative design solutions that arise from a multisensorial approach to communication. She demonstrates what can be gained from centering the nonaverage user, such as blind people who pioneered ways to control the playback speed of media, and Netflix subscribers with invisible disabilities like PTSD who successfully pushed the company to redesign its previews autoplay feature. Drawing on artworks, video games, and creative hacking by users with disabilities, Alexander challenges our understanding of media consumption, the attention economy, and the digital interface.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2025-08-22
Mått:152 x 229 x 18 mm
Vikt:572 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Sign, Storage, Transmission
Antal sidor:232
Förlag:Duke University Press
ISBN:9781478028925

Utforska kategorier

Mer om författaren

Neta Alexander is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Yale University and coauthor of Failure.

Recensioner i media

“Honing its attention on design features, rather than the sprawling scale of platforms or software, this brilliant book points the way to a new media studies. Neta Alexander offers critical theories of refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and Night Shift, foregrounding the ways these seemingly transparent media functions configure and debilitate their users. The book does not end with this diagnosis - rather, Alexander delves into the ‘interface frictions’ experienced (and sometimes encouraged) by disabled and other edge users, finding at this juncture further sources of critique and ‘alternate imaginings of digitality.’” - Mara Mills, Director, New York University Center for Disability Studies “Our bodies are breaking from the strain of being always online. But our debility, Interface Frictions shows, is no accident; it is the intentional result of design decisions to extract profit from us. Neta Alexander’s book is both a passionate manifesto and an incisive history of streaming media retold from the impaired or ‘nonaverage’ user’s perspective. It points us to the ways that access and disability can be reimagined and to the creative strategies by which we might steal back the time to rest and survive.” - Tung-Hui Hu, author of Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction. Disabled/Enabled 11. Repetition, Reloaded: On Refreshing, Latency, and Frictional Aesthetics 252. The Right to Speed Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered Its Blind Users) 553. Automating Trauma: On Autoplay and the Unbingeable 854. “Log In, Chill Out”: On “Horizontal Media,” Night Modes, and Sleep Apps 118Coda. On Digital Disability and the Normalization of Fatigue 150Acknowledgments 165Notes 169Bibliography 197Index