Scrolling and the In‐Between Spaces of Boredom: Marginalized Youths on the Periphery of Vienna

Abstract

Popular narratives on digital media practices are often entrenched in psychologized and apolitical frameworks that ascribe simplistic labels of addiction and deficiencies to digital practices of marginalized youths in particular. This paper explores ethnographically the social complexities behind polemicized, mundane, and apparently meaningless digital practices such as scrolling through social‐media feeds. The author links elements of interfaces designed to grab attention, erase effort, and enable flow, with everyday struggles of youths faced with unemployment, waiting, and boredom. Scrolling is conceptualized as an embodied everyday practice entangled in the intentions of designers. The research draws primarily on an ethnographic study into Viennese youth clubs in 2018 and 2019. Insights from the fieldwork suggest that seemingly trivial practices such as infinite scrolling represent life‐affirming acts of “strolling” through social and commercial arcades as much as they signify boredom and stagnation. [youth, digital design, scrolling, addiction, boredom, smartphones, social media]

A Scoping Review of Children, Empowerment, and Smartphone Technology Regarding Social Construction Theory with the Aim of Increasing Self-Direction in Democracies

“…The following are the titles of the reports of included studies as seen in Table 3: "Impacts of Low Self-control and Opportunity Structure on Cyberbullying Developmental Trajectories: Using a Latent Class Growth Analysis" (Cho and Glassner 2021); "Scrolling and the In-Between Spaces of Boredom: Marginalized Youths on the Periphery of Vienna" (Jovicic 2020); "Cyberbullying Victimization and Perpetration in South Korean Youth: Structural Equation Modeling and Latent Means Analysis" (Kim and Lee 2023); "Predictors for runaway behavior in adolescents in South Korea: national data from a comprehensive survey of adolescents" (Kim and Moon 2023); "Associations Between Parental Maltreatment and Online Behavior Among Young Adolescents" (Kim and Han 2021 A reason these publications did not return in the scoping review of "children, empowerment, smartphones" may have been that the focus of the 4 February 2024 limited Google Scholar search was not empowerment. Google Scholar was not searched as part of the scoping review because it has been evaluated as inappropriate as a principal database since the publication of influential 2020 research in this regard (Gusenbauer and Haddaway 2020).…”

“…The first is that, of the 11 returns, five are concerning South Korea (Cho and Glassner 2021;Kim and Lee 2023;Kim and Moon 2023;Son et al 2021), two are regarding India (Korde and Raghavan 2023;Mohan and Mahanta 2022), and one focuses on Malaysia (Yoga Ratnam et al 2022)-all Eastern democracies. There are only three reports concerning Western democracies: one considering Austria (Jovicic 2020), another focused on the United States (Ramirez 2022), and the third concerning Australia (Whitten et al 2024). This is relevant to note because these particular Eastern democracies have a 'collectivisthierarchical' culture while the Western democracies are represented by 'individualisticegalitarian' culture (Choo et al 2023;Steffensmeier et al 2019;Steffensmeier et al 2020;You 2023).…”

“…Third, what is most evident is that none of the articles concern disruptors. However, the paper reporting the scrolling behavior of Viennese youth (Jovicic 2020) hints that scrolling behavior may not be merely antisocial. Instead, children who socialize by meeting together to individually scroll through their smartphones, rarely interacting with each other, may be in the process of recreating the norms of how people socialize when together from the point of view of the ethnologist author of this article who, in this respect, does not consider the scrolling behavior of these children a waste of time.…”

The Affective Triad: Smartphone in the Ethnographic Encounter

“…Following the "non-digital-centric" (Pink et al, 2016, p. 9) approach to ethnographic study of digital phenomena, I adopted a holistic perspective and embedded youths' practices on and around the smartphone into a larger social, cultural, and political context. Here, "hanging out" online and offline soon turned political, as extended scrolling on the smartphone appeared embedded in the chronic boredom and unemployment of youths struggling to find work and apprenticeships, as the themes of poverty and inequality soon emerged prominently in the ethnographic conversations about issues that many of my interlocutors faced daily (Jovicic, 2020a;Jovicic et al, 2019).…”

From Poacher to Protector of Attention: The Therapeutic Turn of Persuasive Technology and Ethics of a Smartphone Habit-breaking Application

“…In the 2010s, a popular technology criticism was that social media platforms were persuasive by design, enabling internet addiction or compulsive use of digital media technologies (Alter 2017;Lanier 2018;Newport 2019) and preyed upon psychological weaknesses of end users that were originally identified and exploited by the gambling industry (see Schu ¨ll 2012). Scholars contend persuasive technologies further blur the boundary between the technological and human (Dorrestijn and Verbeek 2013;Verbeek 2009Verbeek , 2011, reinforce the power of platform technologies (Stark 2018;Yeung 2017), are emblematic of wider institutional "traps" in society (Seaver 2019) and are complicit in the construction of mundane user digital practices (Jovicic 2020).…”