Introduction: The digital backlash

What we in this volume call the “the digital backlash” covers a range of social and cultural practices of digital disconnection, as well as critiques of the impact of digital technologies and platforms in the world today. It thus includes a variety of overlapping and multifaceted changes and tendencies across societies, including digital disconnection, digital detox, the right to disconnect, media refusal, and what has been called “the techlash”. Hence, it can best be described as a kind of zeitgeist: a period in history in which the norms about digital behaviour, consumption, and habits are being questioned, and where the hype of the early digital era beginning in the 1990s is being challenged. In this introduction, we set the scene of the book by giving an overview of these tendencies and the history of digital critiques, serving to provide a framing for the chapters in the book.