An urgent examination of the threat posed to social media by user disconnection, and the measures websites will take to prevent it

No matter how pervasive and powerful social media websites become, users always have the option of disconnecting—right? Not exactly, as Tero Karppi reveals in this disquieting book. Pointing out that platforms like Facebook see disconnection as an existential threat—and have undertaken wide-ranging efforts to eliminate it—Karppi argues that users’ ability to control their digital lives is gradually dissipating. 

Taking a nonhumancentric approach, Karppi explores how modern social media platforms produce and position users within a system of coded relations and mechanisms of power. For Facebook, disconnection is an intense affective force. It is a problem of how to keep users engaged with the platform, but also one of keeping value, attention, and desires within the system. Karppi uses Facebook’s financial documents as a map to navigate how the platform sees its users. Facebook’s plans to connect the entire globe through satellites and drones illustrates the material webs woven to keep us connected. Karppi analyzes how Facebook’s interface limits the opportunity to opt-out—even continuing to engage users after their physical death. Showing how users have fought to take back their digital lives, Karppi chronicles responses like Web2.0 Suicide Machine, an art project dedicated to committing digital suicide. 

For Karppi, understanding social media connectivity comes from unbinding the bonds that stop people from leaving these platforms. Disconnection brings us to the limit of user policies, algorithmic control, and platform politics. Ultimately, Karppi’s focus on the difficulty of disconnection, rather than the ease of connection, reveals how social media has come to dominate human relations.

Tero Karppi is assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He teaches in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology and in the Faculty of Information.

"Through its clever structure, Disconnect affectively lures the reader as Tero Karppi tells a convincing story of how social media sets the tone, mood, and modality of our everyday existence. Compellingly written, this is a must-read modern tale of engagement and disconnection."—Zizi Papacharissi, author of Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics

"Disconnect is a timely, theoretically rich assessment of Facebook as platform and assemblage. Rhetorics of connectivity dominate Silicon Valley, and Tero Karppi helps illuminate and describe the complex, flickering patterns of connection and disconnection that envelop the networked users of such platforms. This is a valuable, accessible guide to the politics and poetics of Facebook."—Amit Ray, Rochester Institute of Technology

"Disconnect could not have come at a more important time. Tero Karppi’s nuanced writing brings out the rich complexities of social media life and disconnection. This must-read book shows that walking away may not remove Facebook’s presence in our lives, but it reveals the limits of social media in our world and the business models that are built to keep us connected."—Jason Farman, author of Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World