EVENT | #DeleteFacebook and Facebook’s Bonds 07.02.19

#DeleteFacebook and Facebook’s Bonds – Tero Karppi (University of Toronto)

After the Cambridge Analytica revelations, #DeleteFacebook hashtag became a trend. #DeleteFacebook was the crystallization of the demands to leave the social media site because it was compromising privacy, exploiting user data, and the connections it established could be used to manipulate the current political climate. In this talk, which is based on my recent book Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds, I show that the demands to disconnect Facebook have existed almost as long as the social media site. Furthermore, I argue that this threat of disconnection is constitutive to how Facebook understands user engagement and builds its affective bonds. Facebook’s futures depend on disconnection and are designed against its different modes and modalities.

Bio: Tero Karppi is assistant professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto (Mississauga). He is the author of Disconnect. Facebook’s Affective Bonds (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Karppi’s work critically examines social media and cultures of connectivity. His research has been published in journals such as Social Media + Society, Theory, Culture & Society, and Culture Machine.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.