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AbstractWhile smartphones and mobile apps offer convenience and entertainment, they also contribute to distractions and experience of stress in users’ lives. In response to these challenges, digital detox – the voluntary restriction of digital media use – has surged as a significant sociocultural phenomenon. To meet this growing demand, numerous products and services, particularly mobile applications with self-restricting features, have emerged. This study investigates the affordances of digital detox applications that incorporate gamified and self-inhibiting design to limit smartphone usage. Adopting the conceptual frameworks of gamification and undesign, we conducted an app walkthrough study analyzing four smartphone apps: Forest, Hold, Cleverest, and Freedom. Our analysis provides a systematic overview of how gamification and undesign elements are integrated into smartphone applications. Additionally, we explore the connection between these affordances and the monetization models of the apps, revealing the paradox of using technology to mitigate technology overuse. This study provides critical insights into implications of digital detox apps, contributing to the broader discourse on digital disconnection and well-being research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary reading is under transformation. Digital devices supplement traditional paper books with e-books and audiobooks, and at the same time, ubiquitous digital connection challenges focused reading. Based on a qualitative interview study with adult leisure readers, this article explores how affordances offered by digital technologies influence reading habits. Informants demonstrate how e-books and audiobooks enhance reading experiences, as digital affordances influence the how and the when of literary consumption. Three prominent findings are stated. (1) Readers adapt reading mode to the situation, and experienced readers have developed strategies to maximise the ultimate combination of title, format and reading conditions. (2) Digital reading favours lighter texts. This dimension is more substantial for audiobooks, relating to the wide choice of combining audiobooks with other activities. (3) Being devoted readers motivates people to develop strategies to ensure further reading. These strategies effectively make readers practically and temporally disconnect to immerse in literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an emerging range of self-help guides advising users on how to minimise their interaction with media. The aim is to create a lifestyle and identity that is less media-centred and more grounded in “real life”. This article discusses media self-help in the light of theories of media domestication, highlighting processes where the aim is to reduce the importance of, rather than to incorporate, media and communication technology into users’ lives. Based on a sample of 30 guides from the self-help site Wikihow dealing with how to handle television, games and social media respectively, the article discusses media self-help strategies in relation to key concepts of domestication theory: appropriation, objectification, incorporation and conversion. In conclusion, the article argues that strategies of withdrawal and resistance should receive more attention in media studies, and point to the concept of reverse domestication as one way of highlighting such strategies.

This article scrutinizes how digitalization influences fiction and non-fiction literature publishers in the era of ubiquitous digital connection. The analysis states how a lack of attention is triggering a sense of urgency for the future of literary reading. Further, the digital transition entails an overarching ambivalence. Key stakeholders in literary publishing are experiencing how media on platform-based streaming services is competing with traditional reading. They perceive a battle for time and question the future of reading. From the perspectives of Bourdieu's theory, the article reveals how penetrating connectivity is leading to a change in the professional habitus. Continuous busyness and increased professional presence are triggering ambivalence between work-related duties and personal well-being. Moreover, the publishing stakeholders reveal an ambivalence in voicing future expectations. While worried about the future of reading, the professional habitus leans on a promising future for the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft are often accused of leading to excessive and harmful playing, the only gaming activity that is internationally recognized as a pathological disorder is excessive gambling. The present article seeks to establish empirical data on potential harmful online gaming through a comparative structural analysis of massively multiplayer online games and gambling games. The analysis focuses on some of the psycho-structural elements that contribute to excessive gambling, with a special emphasis on the phenomena known as entrapment and near miss. The analysis is based on interviews with twelve heavy users of World of Warcraft and ethnographical observations from the game. The findings suggest that entrapment and near miss are present in World of Warcraft, but with a comparatively weaker impact, and influenced by other elements more typical of this genre, including social engagement and competition. These elements might overall have a stronger effect on the dedication to play excessively.

This article presents an empirically based examination of how the Norwegian television industry incorporates audience activity and audience-generated material, and of how audiences respond to the opportunities presented. It explores three main research questions: First, how extensive is audience activity on television? Second, to what degree do different television activities correspond to familiar patterns of social stratification? And third, is there any evidence for the view that digital feedback channels, such as SMS and the Web, provide access to television for new groups of people? To investigate these questions, a case study of the Norwegian media market has been carried out, based on two data sets. The extent of audience activity is examined through a representative audience survey conducted during a period of two weeks in 2004. The second data set is a one-week survey of Norwegian television output on the six Norwegian-language channels in 2005.

This article analyses how knowledge workers experience and reflect upon intrusions from digital media in the pursuit of focused work. As a multitude of digital media technologies have become integral to working life, scholars have observed a connectivity paradox in which these technologies are experienced as both helpful and hindering, as integral to but also intruding upon focus and concentration. To understand this important and widespread ambivalence in digital society, we analyze qualitative interviews with knowledge workers in a range of professions. With a theoretical framework drawing on domestication theory, sociology of work and critiques of digital modernity, we highlight how workers negotiate spatial, temporal, and technological conditions, and the conflicted norms that are activated in the process. Our findings indicate that negotiations about digital media technologies come to represent psychological, cultural and social dilemmas that go beyond the individual worker, but are nevertheless experienced as individual cross-pressures to be managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between monetisation models, game design and ethical considerations from the perspective of three different small-scale Norwegian game companies: an indie company, a freemium company and a premium company. The aim is to explore critically how small-scale game companies reason and act in the current economy. Interviews with game designers and CEOs form the empirical basis of the analysis. The motives and practices of the informants are categorised according to three ethical schools, namely, deontology, virtue ethics, and utilitarianism. The informants believe that freemium models and free games have made the computer game industry markedly more challenging to monetise. Their views on what is considered ethical monetisation varies between companies, most distinctly between the freemium company and the two others. Informants from the freemium company downplay ethical responsibilities, with reference to the huge number of existing free games and costumers unwilling to pay for games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores implications of the central position of the smartphone in an age of constant connectivity. Based on a qualitative study of 50 informants, we ask how users experience and handle temporal ambivalences in everyday smartphone use, drawing on the concepts flow and responsibilization to conceptualize central dimensions of such ambivalences. The notion of conflicting flows illuminates how brief checking cycles expand at the expense of other activities, resulting in a temporal conflict experienced by users. Responsibilization points to how users take individual responsibility for managing such conflicting flows, and to how this practice is difficult and conflict-ridden. We conclude that while individual time management is often framed as the solution to temporal conflicts, such attempts at regulating smartphone use appear inadequate. Our conceptualization of temporal ambivalence offers a more nuanced understanding of why this is the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We greatly appreciate the care and thought that is evident in the 10 commentaries that discuss our debate paper, the majority of which argued in favor of a formalized ICD-11 gaming disorder. We agree that there are some people whose play of video games is related to life problems. We believe that understanding this population and the nature and severity of the problems they experience should be a focus area for future research. However, moving from research construct to formal disorder requires a much stronger evidence base than we currently have. The burden of evidence and the clinical utility should be extremely high, because there is a genuine risk of abuse of diagnoses. We provide suggestions about the level of evidence that might be required: transparent and preregistered studies, a better demarcation of the subject area that includes a rationale for focusing on gaming particularly versus a more general behavioral addictions concept, the exploration of non-addiction approaches, and the unbiased exploration of clinical approaches that treat potentially underlying issues, such as depressive mood or social anxiety first. We acknowledge there could be benefits to formalizing gaming disorder, many of which were highlighted by colleagues in their commentaries, but we think they do not yet outweigh the wider societal and public health risks involved. Given the gravity of diagnostic classification and its wider societal impact, we urge our colleagues at the WHO to err on the side of caution for now and postpone the formalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an emerging range of self-help guides advising users on how to minimise their interaction with media. The aim is to create a lifestyle and identity that is less media-centred and more grounded in "real life". This article discusses media self-help in the light of theories of media domestication, highlighting processes where the aim is to reduce the importance of, rather than to incorporate, media and communication technology into users' lives. Based on a sample of 30 guides from the self-help site Wikihow dealing with how to handle television, games and social media respectively, the article discusses media self-help strategies in relation to key concepts of domestication theory: appropriation, objectification, incorporation and conversion. In conclusion, the article argues that strategies of withdrawal and resistance should receive more attention in media studies, and point to the concept of reverse domestication as one way of highlighting such strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the issue of violence in computer games. It looks into studies of how viewers are influenced by violent elements of such media. The author also discusses the concept of "interactivity" in computer games. He presents definitions of interactive experiences associated with computer gaming along with a discussion of his studies based on strategy and action games and the game called Carmageddon.