Entertained or Else: Boredom and Networked Media

This book considers the complex and often contradictory relations that are forged between boredom and everyday media use in the twenty-first century and demonstrates how networked media have developed new technical means of capitalizing on boredom’s state of suspension to make it into a source of value creation. Focusing on the discursive, technological, and affective structures that encourage users to be entertaining and to remain entertained, the book analyses how boredom has been increasingly instrumentalized as both an individual mood and a wider structure of feeling that drives participation across media networks. It identifies the range of cultural techniques for codifying, classifying, sensing, and pre-empting boredom, as well as those that teach users, counter-intuitively, to embrace boring media as a means of coping with the intensities of always-on existence. However, if boredom is positioned in a digital network culture as a feeling that keeps driving us back to our social media feeds, it is important to ask how else it might operate. While the technological affordances of computational media have put pressure on our ability to conceive of boredom as a radical challenge to digital capitalism, this book attempts to think about the potential that might still be embedded in boredom’s capacity to temporarily suspend or to neutralize dominant structures of attention and affect. Building on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Byung-Chul Han, Roland Barthes, and from historical accounts of boredom and entertainment, the book provides a new understanding of boredom in the context of networked media.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: Always Entertained? Boredom and Networked Media 1. What To Do When You’re Bored: Gendered Boredom and Networked Media 2. How to Look Bored: Bored Bodies and the Biopolitics of Faciality and Gesture in Short-Form Video 3. Boredom-on-Demand: Always-On Subjects and Television’s Ambient Turn 4. #Bored in the House: TikTok and the Rhythms of #LockdownLife Epilogue: Unworking Entertainment: Public Boredom and the Next Normal Notes Index

About the Author :
Tina Kendall is Associate Professor of Film & Media and Director of Research Students in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK. She has a particular interest in negative or ambivalent feelings such as boredom and disgust. She has published widely on the ethics and aesthetics of extreme cinemas, and is the co-editor of The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe 2013).

Review :
Tina Kendall’s Entertained or Else makes a groundbreaking intervention into boredom studies by showing how social media and digital cultures of boredom generate their own creative potential. In an age where productivity is so highly valued, Kendall demonstrates boredom’s capacity to feel otherwise, but also its ambivalence in being drawn back into wider regimes of power. The book takes us through the full range of affective, bodily, gestural, discursive and atmospheric ways that boredom moves us (or doesn’t), while recognizing the wider political structures and intersectional inequalities that make such a project so vital in our times. It will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in digital media, cultural studies and researchers and students of emotion, feeling and affect. With the invention of the Internet, we managed to invent not only unheard of new forms of stimulation, but also unprecedented levels of boredom, nestled within these same digital networks. In this never-dull new book, Tina Kendall is our beguiling tour guide of these new Dante-like levels of tedium, demonstrating how this most feared of feelings might also be an opportunity to break the compulsive search for our next quick dopamine fix. This book offers a smart, insightful and engaging analysis of boredom as both an underpinning structure of feeling and a perpetual problem that digital platforms promise to solve. Resisting totalizing analyses of networked culture, Kendall opens up much needed novel ways of understanding the imperatives of entertainment and the complex dynamics that boredom is made of.