Results by title

How digital platforms profit from our inability to log off

Endurance Media explores how contemporary digital technologies extract value from our bodies by demanding sustained engagement that pushes us beyond, and even reconfigures, our limits. It introduces the concept of “endurance media”—systems, platforms, and practices that require users to align their bodily rhythms with relentless media temporalities, transforming exhaustion itself into a profitable resource and a cultural fantasy.

In Endurance Media leading media scholars explore the dark intersection of metabolic capitalism and algorithmic control. From exercise bikes that monetize heart rates and caloric expenditure, to gaming suits that deliver electric shocks for “haptic realism,” to energy drinks marketed as performance enhancers for marathon gaming sessions, Endurance Media reveals how digital platforms colonize rest time under the guise of pleasure, interactivity, and autonomy. This analysis extends from individual bodies to planetary infrastructure, connecting personal media habits to the environmental costs of server farms and AI resource extraction.

At stake is the possibility of recuperating endurance as a space for alternative modes of duration, relationality, and collective survival. To that end, this book offers a critical alternative through “anti-endurance media”—a disability-informed framework that values rest, refusal, and collective care over relentless individual optimization.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

In Interface Frictions, Neta Alexander explores how ubiquitous design features in digital platforms reshape, condition, and break our bodies. She shows that while features such as refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and night mode are convenient, they can lead to “digital debility”—the slow and often invisible ways that technologies may harm human bodies. These features all assume an able-bodied user and at the same time push users to ignore their bodily limitations like the need for rest, nourishment, or movement. Building on the lived experiences of people with disabilities, Alexander explores alternative design solutions that arise from a multisensorial approach to communication. She demonstrates what can be gained from centering the nonaverage user, such as blind people who pioneered ways to control the playback speed of media, and Netflix subscribers with invisible disabilities like PTSD who successfully pushed the company to redesign its previews autoplay feature. Drawing on artworks, video games, and creative hacking by users with disabilities, Alexander challenges our understanding of media consumption, the attention economy, and the digital interface.