This paper explores and exemplifies the complex interplay between boredom and media practice in the everyday life of young people in Sweden. Being bored is a fundamental aspect of youth culture and experience, as well as a common theme in the narratives and imageries of youth popular culture. Yet the issue of boredom remains inexplicably underexplored in both youth cultural studies and media and audience research. Though boredom has long been acknowledged as an integral part of the lived realities of young people (Corrigan, 1979; Willis, 1977), including their everyday media practices (Hjort & Richardson, 2009; Livingstone, 2002), boredom is rarely the main analytic focus, and it generally tends to be taken for granted rather than explored in-depth. At the same time, the last couple of years has seen the emergence of a new multidisciplinary research field called “boredom studies” (Gardiner & Haladyn 2017), dealing explicitly with the many facets of  boredom, but apart from Paasonen’s (2021) ambitious treatment of the relationship between media and boredom there has so far been little exchange between boredom scholars and media scholars.

Theorizing boredom as a socially constructed emotion (Thoits, 1989) emanating from perceived lack of meaningfulness (Barbalet, 1999), this paper puts the boredom in young people’s lives at the center of analytic attention and explores the ways in which their media practices both relieve and reinforce emotional experiences of boredom in digital life. Taking inspiration from media ethnography and drawing on original empirical material from in-depth qualitative interviews with four Swedish university students (18–20 years old), the paper sets out to revive boredom as an issue in the study of youth culture and everyday media practice. By showing how emotional experiences of boredom are always embedded and shaped in everyday life contexts and situations, intersected with other emotions such as loneliness, and actively regulated through a variety of both media and non-media practices, it also makes a much-needed empirical contribution to the growing body of mainly theoretical literature on the relationship between boredom and digital media (Hand, 2017; Kendall, 2018; Paasonen, 2021).

This chapter introduces rurality-TV as a genre, and we discuss how public service media, through this genre, contributes to symbolically resolving tensions between the rural and the urban, and we address processes of mobility and urbanisation in the Nordics. Three popular reality-TV programmes depicting rural life are analysed: Bonderøven [loosely translated as The Hillbilly], later known as Frank & Kastaniegaarden (DR), Hjälp vi har köpt en bondgård! [Help we have bought a farm!] (SVT), and Oppfinneren [The Inventor] (NRK). These are approached through three questions: What constitutes public service rurality-TV as a genre in terms of form and content? What values are negotiated in the programmes? How can we understand rurality-TV in the context of public service broadcasting in the media welfare state?

This paper presents findings from an online questionnaire that collected experiences from the Facebook outage on October 4th, 2021, an event that affected approximately three billion users around the globe. The purpose of the study is to contribute to recent discussions digital disconnection and digital wellbeing by using an extraordinary event of involuntary disconnection as point of departure. Our research questions were: Where were people when the services shut down, what did they think and what did they do? What correlations can be found between usage/attitudes to social media and the experiences of the outage? How can the outage of October 4th be understood as a snapshot of our cultural condition? The questionnaire was distributed to 463 Swedish university students and 191 responses were received. Our analysis shows how the involuntary disconnection caused by the outage was an event that highlights the ambivalence of digital life. It also points to some correlations between general social media use and attitudes, and the experiences and activities during the outage. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications that these findings may have for further research into digital disconnection. © The Author(s) 2023

This paper explores how a social media breakdown is experienced in a highly wired context where social media practice has become mundane to the point of invisibility (Chun, 2016; Deuze, 2012). More specifically, it examines how a group of Swedish university students (n=191) responded to the major Facebook outage on the evening of October 4th 2021, when popular services such as Facebook, Instagram and Messenger stopped working for about six hours. Drawing on empirical data from an online survey conducted in the immediate aftermath of this unusual global event of involuntary disconnection, as well as on theory and research on historical blackouts, digital disconnection and digital wellbeing, the paper brings to light and discusses the affective ambiguities of contemporary digital life. For example, the most frequently used words for describing the experience of the outage were “nice” and “relaxing” but also “stressful” and “boring”. By exploring the emotions involved in the experience of being suddenly and collectively disconnected for hours, this paper makes a valuable contribution not only to previous studies on affect and technological failure where the focus is rather on individual responses to more temporary malfunctions (Paasonen, 2015). It also contributes to the growing field of digital disconnection studies by examining experiences of involuntary disconnection instead of practices of voluntary disconnection and abstention from digital media (Syvertsen, 2020; Syvertsen & Enli, 2020).

This paper presents findings from an online questionnaire that collected experiences from the Facebook outage on October 4th 2021. This outage was an event that that activates questions of experiencing “one world, one network”, as it affected approximately 3 billion users around the globe. The purpose of the study is to contribute to recent discussions digital disconnection and digital wellbeing by using an extraordinary event of involuntary disconnection as point of departure. Our research questions were: Where were people when the services shut down, what did they think and what did they do? What correlations can be found between usage/attitudes to social media and the experiences of the outage? How can the outage of October 4th be understood as a snapshot of our cultural condition? The questionnaire was distributed to 463 university students and 191 responses were received. Our analysis shows how the involuntary disconnection of October 4th 2021 was an event that highlights the ambivalence of digital life, and point to some correlations between general use and attitudes, and the experiences and activities during the outage. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications that these findings may have for further research into digital disconnection.

In this article, I explore how social class shapes the conditions and configurations of digital media practice in the everyday life of young people in Sweden. Drawing on Bourdieusian theory and qualitative interview data from two research projects, I complicate the notion of Sweden as a universally wired media welfare state by showing how economic and cultural forces are structuring Internet access and digital media practice along the lines of preexisting social divisions. Invoking Bourdieu's conceptualisation of social classes as defined both intrinsically and relationally, I identify and exemplify two different but interrelated processes whereby class makes a difference in young people's everyday relationship to digital media: class conditioning and class positioning. I conclude the article by arguing that distinguishing between these processes might offer a better understanding of the relationship between class and everyday media practice. The complexities of advancing a welfare-oriented media policy in the age of digital media are also discussed. © 2021 Martin Danielsson, published by Sciendo 2021.

Sweden is regularly highlighted as one of the most egalitarian and wired countries in the world. While this might be correct in the light of international statistical comparisons, there is also another side to the story. Despite years of policy reforms designed in order to counter the emergence and solidification of digital inequalities, this paper shows that economic and cultural forces are still at work structuring people’s internet access and digital media use along the lines of preexisting social divisions.

Drawing on Bourdieusian theory and qualitative interview data from two different research projects, the paper specifically sheds light on the ways in which social class shapes the conditions and configurations of digital media practice in the everyday life of young people in Sweden. In particular, Bourdieu’s conceptualization of social classes as defined both intrinsically (by their material conditions of existence) and relationally (by their position in relation to each other) is invoked in order to explore and elucidate two different but interrelated processes whereby class makes difference in young people’s everyday relationship to digital media: class conditioning and class positioning.

In order to illustrate the process of class conditioning, i.e. how certain material conditions of existence both condition and produce certain conditionings in relation to digital media practice, the paper draws mainly on in-depth interviews with parents and children conducted within a still ongoing project on digital media in economically deprived families with children. Class positioning is exemplified and discussed with reference to the findings of a completed qualitative study on the role of social class for young men’s digital media preferences and practices. The results of this study, based on interviews with 34 young men (16-19 years) of different social origin, clearly indicate how such preferences and practices are not only configured relationally in terms of class, but also potentially involved in the reproduction of the existing class structure.The ways in which the dual processes of class conditioning and class positioning are played out in the context of young people’s mediatized everyday life bear witness to the complexities involved in advancing a media policy geared towards general social welfare in the age of digital media. Universal internet penetration is a necessary but hardly sufficient condition for the abolishment of digital inequalities. The findings presented and discussed in this paper rather suggest that the ongoing proliferation of new media technologies and practices creates a rich soil for new forms of class-making.

This paper presents findings from a review of articles about media literacy interventions, with the purpose to discuss the value of child participation in the design of such interventions. The findings indicate that while numerous studies present evaluations of media literacy interventions, it is rare that the design processes behind these interventions are described. The most popular form of media literacy intervention is a school curriculum aimed towards tweens and teens. We argue for a closer attention to the ways in which media literacy interventions are designed in order for us to better understand when child participation can be beneficial.