Part 3 of the book addresses multimodal texts, i.e., texts that operate in the linguistic modality (they use language, in other words) and in some other additional modality or modalities. For example, film, video, or graphics are other modalities (visual, auditive, etc.). Gestures are another modality as well, including facial expressions, hand gestures, body stance, and eye gaze. In short, meaning, broadly intended, can be conveyed in many different ways, only some of which are linguistic. Of course in an image or a silent video no language is used and quite simply the linguistic modality is not used, and, as Seinfeld used to say, there's nothing wrong with that.

In particular we will consider in embarrassment comedy (also known as cringe comedy), one of the defining new genres of the digital age, photobombing, the quintessential visual and non-verbal genre, and the video parody. The latter is exemplified by the Hitler rants, an incredibly popular sub-genre, reaction videos, a parody of a music video by German metal band Rammstein done with legos, and the uniquely digital genre of the rant-to-music video, in which someone's rant is set to music.

The job of the humor scholar is to tackle difficult questions, which other scholars shy from. In this chapter, I will address the issue of why is Grumpy Cat funny?

Anthropomorphism

Grumpy Cat, the feline named in the title of this chapter, was an internet celebrity. The actual name of the cat was Tardar Sauce (note the spelling). It lived for seven years (2012–2019), according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumpy_Cat). Grumpy Cat's death was reported by the international press, for example, The NY Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

The cat has its own website (https://www.grumpycats.com) where one can buy merchandise with the cat's likeness, such as a calendar (Figure 13.1). By any standards, Grumpy Cat is an internet star, according to Wikipedia, “As of March 5, 2019, Grumpy Cat had 8.3 million total followers on Facebook, 2.4 million followers on Instagram and 1.5 million followers on Twitter.”

Having established that Grumpy Cat is better known than most people, we need to attempt to explicate the source of the animal's fame. Unquestionably its “grumpy” facial expression was the starting point of its fame. Apparently, the grumpy facial expression was the result of an underbite and feline dwarfism (Wikipedia). Be that as it may, it is unquestionable that the cat's expression looks grumpy. Here a possible explanation seems to have prima facie (pun intended) credibility: people recognize the expression of the cat because it matches the facial expression that in humans is associated with bad (grumpy) mood.

Now it is the case that facial expressions in non-human animals exist and have been investigated (see for example a review in Waller & Micheletta, 2013) and in the case of mammals bear remarkable similarity to the facial expressions of humans or are functionally equivalent to them, for example in primates the bared teeth expression is equivalent to the human smile, indicating benevolence.

The fact that some animals may display facial expressions and express emotions and desires that are recognizable to humans is probably the ultimate source of anthropomorphism, that is, attributing human-like characteristics to animals. I am taking the Grumpy Cat–type memes to be the quintessential expression of animal anthropomorphization.

Of course the anthropomorphization and human fascination with cats (and other animals, domestic and not) did not begin with the internet.

In 2020, the world experienced an unprecedented global crisis that destabilized existing social, cultural, legal, economic, ethical, medical and digital structures in various contexts across different countries. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted lives in every society around the world. We now collectively face the task of critically assessing how these disruptions, destabilizations and decentralizations of power, justice and equality have created new opportunities, while also cementing and exacerbating existing inequalities. One of the key ways in which these opportunities and/or further oppressions were mechanized and operationalized was through the rapidly increased use of digital technologies across various spheres in science, technology and society: from public health, to education, politics, work and everyday life. In many instances, the newly introduced technologies were compulsory, or seen as necessary and unavoidable. Introduced as temporary measures, they often remained even after the initial ‘need’ had gone away. The rise in digitization was sudden and rushed, often justified by the crisis nature of the pandemic, leaving little room for critical interventions, reflection or resistance.

Within the context of these recent monumental and global changes brought by the pandemic, how then can we understand – and be critical of – new forms and practices of digital technologies and networked communications? How might they challenge, reinforce and/or maintain existing, normative inequalities, injustices and infringements to human and data rights around the world? What new dilemmas were created by shifting much of work, education and everyday interactions into online environments? What new data grabs have emerged or become normalized? And finally, what spaces and possibilities are there to resist encroaching digitality? What is the place of digital refusal in the fabric of pandemic and post-pandemic life?

Exploring these questions is what motivated us to put this book together, to begin making sense of the rapid and extensive increase, reliance and shifts in meaning of digital technologies after the pandemic. In order to critique some of the inequalities and consider the potential opportunities for digital justice, we situate our discussion within a larger theoretical framework of ‘digital disengagement’ (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2015; 2019; 2022). Developed as a paradigmatic shift that challenges the normalization of digital technologies in everyday life and social research, this framework begins at the point of disconnection, refusal and opting out.

Introduction

Amid the social distancing, doom-scrolling and mounting Zoom fatigue that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, people reached for pens, paper and postage stamps. Despite their long legacy, handwritten letters are often discussed as a novelty when social connection seems just a text or video call away. Nonetheless, the pandemic brought on sympathy card shortages and think pieces on the benefits of sending letters for a pandemic-addled, computer-saturated sociality. Penpal programmes blossomed, and, according to a survey by the US Postal Service, people reported sending more personal mail than they had before (US Postal Service, 2021). Even as the pandemic unevenly altered online social connection for many (Nguyen et al, 2020), the proliferation of handwritten letters presented an alternative to digital modes of social interaction and a supposed escape from the connective commodification engendered in platform economies (van Dijck, 2013). After all, media scholars have long argued that analogue epistolatory technologies invite intimacy and social presence because of their textualized and material qualities, not in spite of them (Milne, 2010).

Beyond the cultural salience of letters, however, the popularity of hashtags about letter writing also grew on the same social media platforms that handwritten letters circumvent. Letterwriting aesthetics trended on Instagram long before COVID-19, but, within the altered climates of pandemic digitalities, their growth takes on new meaning. People shared images of letters they received and others they planned to send using hashtags such as #SnailMailRevolution and #SendLove. More telling, however, are the dozens of popular letter-writing campaigns that sprung up to combat pandemic social isolation and engage political causes, encouraging participants to share their missives on Instagram. Campaign communications and news articles discuss letter writing as a means to disengage from the digital and reconnect in novel yet nostalgic ways, which, according to journalist Tanya Basu (2020) ‘makes snail mail possibly more powerful than email or text’. The New York Times reported that letter writing is ‘getting people through this time’ (Danovich, 2020), while the founder of a viral pandemic penpal project explained, ‘There is something about [letter writing] being disconnected from this immediacy of online that feels enchanting to people’ (Cooper, 2021).

This book began with a critical question – ‘What is the place of digital refusal in the fabric of pandemic and post-pandemic life?’ – which emerged as part of our collective reflection on the rise in digitization during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond. The process of answering this question was often accompanied by the rapidly diminishing possibility of stepping away from compulsory digitalities. Presenting the paradigm of digital disengagement that challenges the normalization of the digital (and of digital solutionism in particular) and foregrounds opting out and refusal as a starting point, the book thus explores a number of aspects of digital disengagement in pandemic and post-pandemic times. Some of our contributors have focused explicitly on the social and political effects of forced digital engagement; for example, Esperanza Miyake's discussion of its macro-level global economic and racializing power, or Serra Sezgin's analysis of its impact on micro-level working practices and work– life balance. Others have documented and analysed practices of disengagement and refusal, and the paradoxes they involve. Sam Martin's chapter explored digital disengagement, which relies on furthering one's digital skills and data literacy to avoid datafication, state surveillance and potential criminalization through use of fertility apps, whereas Chelsea Butkowski detailed how over-saturation with digital connectivity during the pandemic led many to step away from the digital almost entirely into the domain of pen and paper – only to share the results online afterwards. Continuing the topic of digital disengagement as a means of resistance to surveillance, Annika Richterich turned to hacker practices of data minimalism as a method to systematically, consistently and deliberately reduce the level of invasive datafication. Here, digital disengagement is less about a break away from the digital, but instead is about its systemic reduction. Moving to exploration of digital disengagement in the context of climate crisis and ecological harms, Adi Kuntsman's chapter looks at systemic forms of digital reduction to reduce the toll of pandemic digitization on the environment. Concluding and expanding the discussion of digital disengagement in contexts of systemic harms, Seeta Pena Gangadharan and Patrick Williams discuss the possibilities of digital disengagement as resistance to state power and the violence it inflicts on racialized communities.

Introduction

Over the last decade, there has been a large increase in people's use of mobile health apps (mHealth) to track not only their general health, fitness levels and mental health (Ming et al, 2020), but also more specific medical conditions and biological indicators, such as chronic illnesses, obesity, and fertility and menstruation cycles (Byambasuren et al, 2018; Polzer et al, 2022). While the use of mHealth apps was indeed prevalent before the pandemic, during the pandemic itself, the increased reliance on technology for virtual communication, data collecting and data sharing during lockdowns, quarantines and beyond has meant that people have focused more on using technology and mHealth apps than ever before. In this chapter, ‘pre-pandemic’ refers to the 10-year period between 2010 and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020, ‘during the pandemic’ refers to the period from February 2020 until the first COVID-19 vaccine rollouts in December 2021 to March 2022, and ‘post-pandemic’ refers to the period between the time when the COVID-19 vaccine programme became more globally established and worldwide lockdowns decreased (from April 2022 to September 2022 and beyond). The chapter discusses the continuation of use of period apps during the pandemic (from February 2020 to March 2022), and the worry expressed by women regarding use of the apps that they had used before and during the pandemic during the window of time after Roe vs Wade was repealed in June 2022, with a continued discussion of app surveillance and a desire to digitally disengage from or circumvent this surveillance in the months going forward.

During the pandemic, one of the main focuses of mHealth apps was to develop an understanding of how to navigate the coronavirus during the pandemic and understand how it affected our bodies (Shah et al, 2021), not only in terms of initial infection and recovery (or prolonged symptoms/non-recovery in the context of long COVID), but also in terms of the effect of this new virus on everyday bodily functions, such sleep, mental health and mobility (Robertson et al, 2021).

Introduction

Technological solutionism is appealing, especially during a crisis forcefully asserted to be ‘unprecedented’ (Milan, 2020; Taylor, 2020; Yan, 2020). The global spread of COVID-19 triggered an avalanche of initiatives promising digital solutions for tackling the pandemic and its impact on societies (Budd, 2020; Madianou, 2020). Typically, the retrieval and analysis of personal, health-related data were/are at the heart of these initiatives (Breuer et al, 2020; Lucivero et al, 2020; Hoffman, 2021). Amidst the flurry of governmental and corporate actions, civic organizations warned that ‘efforts to contain the virus must not be used as a cover to usher in a new era of greatly expanded systems of invasive digital surveillance’ (Civil Society Statement, 2020). Among those signing the statement were hacker communities such as the Honduran Barracón Digital Hacklab and the German Chaos Computer Club.

This chapter explores activism – aka ‘hacktivism’ (Jordan, 2002; Jordan and Taylor, 2004; Milan, 2013; Tanczer, 2016; Maxigas, 2017; Galli, 2018; Romagna, 2020) – among such hacker communities, opposing digital solutionism in times of the COVID-19 pandemic and advocating for ‘data minimalism’ as a means of digital disengagement. Hacktivism, a portmanteau of hacking and activism, refers to the ‘politically motivated use of technical expertise’ (Milan, 2015: p 550) and has been described as ‘activism gone electronic’ (Jordan and Taylor, 2004: p 1). I focus on the case of the German Chaos Computer Club (CCC), notably its hacktivism early on during the COVID-19 pandemic (from 2020 to 2021). Conceptually, I relate the notion of digital disengagement (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2019) to data minimalism (Loesing et al, 2010; Vitale et al, 2018; Kaufmann, 2020). In doing so, this chapter emphasizes informed, purposeful strategies for digital disengagement through data minimalism, observed among a hacker association that is known for high levels of digital skills and tech-political expertise.

Especially early on during the pandemic, Germany was among the Western European countries most severely affected by COVID-19. Despite a comparatively wellfunded and resilient health system, even in terms of capacities and equipment in intensive care units, hospitals and other healthcare providers were significantly strained due to the pandemic (Rieg et al, 2020). In response, manifold technological initiatives emerged, aiming and claiming to mitigate the impact of COVID-19.

Introduction

The rapid change and transmission of communication technologies have transformed our interaction types and engagement styles on digital media parallel to social, political, cultural and economic relationships. As there is a dialectic relationship between cultural, social and daily life and digital transformation, the concept of digital engagement as a complex phenomenon requires consistent re-evaluation/re-thinking as for concepts such as digital economics, labour politics and inequality issues (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2019). In addition, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020, the general population had to adapt to a new way of life, primarily because of the reduction of face-to-face communication, socialization and other physical interactions. The pandemic dramatically affected the social life and work practices of the general population. This game-changing situation created a need for more comprehensive and multidimensional approaches to communication studies, specifically the practices of digital (dis)engagement. The pandemic had worldwide socio-cultural impacts, but these new adaptations to social life and work culture also depended on national policies. Nations’ COVID-19 regulations are mainly driven by their economic and technological capacities.

When the first COVID-19 case in Turkey was announced on 11 March 2020, the public and private sectors had already shifted to a flexible working system. Businesses with a small number of personnel in the workplace provided flexibility to their staff through remote working options. By 11 April, Turkey had announced a total lockdown for its citizens. Some measures, including the curfew, were taken by the government at various intervals, considering some factors such as seasonal conditions, holidays, age group, location, etc.

A year after the first COVID-19 case, Turkey was in 5th position in the world in terms of the number of cases that had been seen, and in 19th position in terms of mortality caused by COVID-19. During this period, the government tried to minimize the adverse economic effects of COVID-19 by providing low-interest loans or various support packages to its citizens. However, this period has been considered the biggest economic crisis era after World War II by the president in terms of it its outcome (Timeturk, 2020). In this period, when life was housebound, creative industries that used digital technologies at the centre and did not necessarily rely on a workspace or the physical presence at the office of the employees, brought workspaces to homes.

Seeta Peña Gangadharan is a media and communication scholar and one of the co-founders of Our Data Bodies (https://www.odbproject.org/), a US-based team exploring the ways that digital information on low-income and racialized communities is collected, stored and used by governments and corporations. She has written extensively on the relationships between technologies, and exclusion, marginalization and injustice.

Patrick Williams is a UK-based critical criminologist who has focused, for many years, on racial discrimination and racism shaping the Criminal Justice system. More specifically, his work addresses the over-policing and over-criminalization of Black, Asian and other minority ethnic communities in the UK. Most recently, he has published a number of articles and reports on ‘data driven policing’ and on encroachment of tech into structures of institutional and state violence.

Adi Kuntsman: The three of us are very familiar with your work and are much inspired by it. We want to open this conversation by asking you generally about your work on the relationships between state violence, such as policing or warfare, and systemic injustices of racism, and enforced uses of digital technologies. How do these feature in your work, and how do you see the possibilities, or maybe lack thereof, for escaping or refusing the digital and what that might depend on?

Patrick Williams: First, a quick overview of some of the work that I have been involved with, and just as a way of making sense of some of this, it's important for me to acknowledge that the analysis of tech was never really at the fore of the work I was involved with – which is why I am quite pleased to be in this space with Seeta who has a much better understanding of these issues than I do. My work, for 20 years, has been concerned with the over-policing, racial disparities, discrimination and racist police in the criminal justice and law enforcement systems. However, the more recent pieces of work that I have been involved in have forced me to begin to think about the emergence and encroachment of technology into policing.

Introduction

This chapter discusses environmental impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, more specifically, the impact of the overall shift towards digital technologies during the pandemic and in post-pandemic times. The chapter builds on my long-term work on environmental imaginaries of digital technologies, the idea of digital solutionism in environmental sustainability, and the paradigmatic myopia with regard to environmental harms of digital technologies. My discussion in this chapter is driven by the question. when lockdowns, social distancing and other safety measures bring accelerated (and often compulsory) digitization, what space is left – if any – for environmentally driven digital disengagement, and what space is left to challenge the violent impact of extractive digital economies on human and non-human life, when pandemic safety is imagined predominantly as dependent on digital devices, connection networks and data?

Digital technologies and the global digital economy inflict significant damage on both humans and the environment, and contribute to global environmental injustice, as many of their harms affect first and foremost the Global South, whereas digital overconsumption mostly takes place and benefits those in the Global North. The harms include mining of the rare minerals needed to produce digital devices, the ever-growing amount of ewaste generated by digital devices (many of which are designed to only last a few years), and the energy demands and carbon emissions of internet traffic and data farms as well as of AI, deep machine learning, cryptocurrency and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) (Chen, 2016; Emejulu and McGregor, 2016; Good, 2016; Qiu, 2016; Velkova, 2016; Cubitt, 2017; Maxwell and Miller, 2020; Brevini, 2021; Truby et al, 2022). However, despite a growing number of critical voices, pointing to the environmental and human costs of digital media and communication, the subject remains on the margins of socio-cultural research into digital transformations. In environmental communication, for example, digital technologies are mostly instrumentalized as tools of effective messages, rather than as material entities with their own environmental footprint (but see several notable exceptions: Starosielski and Walker, 2016; Brevini and Murdock, 2017; Shriver-Rice and Vaughan, 2020). In addition, the majority of discussions around environmental sustainability and climate change are shaped by ‘digital solutionism’ (Kuntsman and Rattle, 2019) – a belief that digital technologies themselves are not only environmentally neutral but also beneficial for environmental protection.

Introduction

On 24 March 2020, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that both its president, Thomas Bach, and the Japanese Prime Minister at that time, Shinzo Abe, had reached an agreement to postpone the Tokyo 2020 Olympics by a year, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The statement presented the decision as one made between the IOC and Japan, for the ‘good’ of the people, stating that ‘Human lives take precedence’ and ‘We agreed that the safety, security of the athletes and spectators are paramount’ (International Olympic Committee, 2020). A year later, with COVID-19 cases rising in Japan (which had to declare a state of emergency weeks before the Olympics), despite calls from the medical community and the majority of the population to cancel, the Olympics nonetheless went ahead. Athletes competed in audience-free stadias, and the promised boom for the tourism industry and the Japanese economy never occurred. Furthermore, there was little to no option for Japan to refuse: Japan was legally and contractually obliged to make the Olympics happen, or else they faced great financial loss/heavy fines. Global broadcasters, corporate sponsors and spectators around the world, watching from the comfort of their screens, had everything to gain. Japan was still burdened with the reality of having to deliver the Olympics for global consumption, despite the great associated financial losses and risks to the health and wellbeing of its citizens in the middle of a global pandemic.

The only way in which the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was able to happen at all was largely due to Japan's digital infrastructure. The Tokyo 2020 Olympics represents some of the most alarming – and as we will see, problematically racialized – ways in which the digital was offered as a perfect ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of hosting a global event during the pandemic. In his work on technological solutionism, Morosov (2013) discusses the propensity for solutionists to recast complex social situations through quick technological ‘fixes’, arguing that such ‘solutions’ lead to ‘unexpected consequences that could eventually cause more damage than the problems they seek to address’ (Morosov, 2013: p 5).

Algorithmic thinking is both elusive and everywhere. It is hard to see and impossible to avoid. While having significant power and influence, it is so intricately connected into social structures and everyday experiences that it goes almost unnoticed. Very little resides outside or untouched by algorithmic thinking and, crucially, its tensions. Acknowledging this hypedup incorporation and unbending inescapability, Rosie DuBrin and Ashley E. Gorham (2021) have written of a form of ‘algorithmic interpellation’. To engage with the social world is, frequently, to be interpellated into some form of algorithmic process. We are hailed by algorithmic systems; resisting the temptation to turn to face them is not really an option. Given this context, I’m not even sure that a complete or definitive understanding of contemporary algorithms and algorithmic thinking is possible. And anyway, any attempt to do so is likely to miss the dynamism and sheer variability of the issues and consequences. Alongside this, algorithmic thinking and algorithmic systems never seem to settle into place for long enough to be fully grasped. They are on the move, they change, they mutate and they are coded and recoded. The ideals of continual supposed advancement are built into them; they are codified in their very form. Even if algorithmic thinking were to freeze for long enough for a stable depiction to be sketched, the many different forms of algorithmic thinking would be too vast and contested to be fully mapped. As a result, any such picture is always likely to be incomplete and is always likely to miss the pulsing mobilities, momentums and dynamics of what automation and its various processes might incorporate or entail.

Shifting the focus to concentrate on this very mobility and dynamism is one way to proceed. In the case of this book, rather than seeing algorithmic processes as a fixed object of study I have instead taken some of the tensions of algorithmic thinking as my focus. This approach affords a perspective on the relational aspects of automation, the forces and frictions that define its forms and the ideals and future trajectories that are bound up within it.