A new book by U of T Mississauga researcher Tero Karppi argues social media users' ability to control their digital lives is at risk (Photo by Future Image/C.Hardt/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
Academics have spent the last decade studying connectivity and social media – a trend that has more than two billion people around the world on Facebook and counting.
For Tero Karppi, however, the focus has instead been disconnection.
“I always tended to go against the grain,” says Karppi, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology who specializes in social media and media theory.
His new book, Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds, explores the challenges users face when they try to deactivate their Facebook accounts, and how efforts by social media companies to keep users logging in may be giving us less control over our digital lives.
Karppi started researching the topic in his native Finland, where a technology-savvy population enthusiastically began to use Facebook around 2010. “It was becoming a really big thing and expanding widely,” recalls Karppi, who was among the early adopters using the platform to stay current and in touch with far-flung friends, family and colleagues.
“It was an interesting phenomenon – how quickly it spread.”
But he noticed it was also difficult to say goodbye to this increasingly compelling platform. European media artists started to do special “Quit Facebook” projects, while many people tried to give it up simply to avoid the distractions of the medium.
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