About the Masterclass

During the past decade or so, the promise of social media to connect people with frictionless ease has been met with scholarship exploring mundane tactics and possibilities of disconnection (Light 2014; Karppi 2018) and the persistent discomfort, or friction, involved in what Elija Cassidy identifies as “participatory reluctance”, namely engagement “when we would actually prefer not to or would rather do so under altered circumstances” (Cassidy 2016: 2614). Building on findings from the large-scale research project, Intimacy in Data Driven Culture (2019–2025), this talk explores reluctant and ambiguous engagement in a context where social media, and networked connectivity more broadly, has become infrastructural to how everyday lives are navigated and how social proximities and distances are managed. Lauren Berlant’s (2022: 36) discussion of inconveniences as a constant in social connections further helps in mapping out such infrastructural connections as ones involving “the inconvenience paradox of dependency” of “needing people or a situation and hating to have that need”. It is my suggestion that a focus on frictions within socio-technological connecting offers analytical avenues for challenging diagnoses of social media addiction within which users are seen as trapped or seduced by the platforms they engage with, and for framing such participation in ways respectful of the complexities that make the everyday and its fabrics of connection.

To apply

This Masterclass is open to bachelor/ master students and PhD researchers. For more information and to apply please send an email  stating your name, contact details and study programme/ affiliation to gdc@uva.nl.   

Deadline: Monday 2nd March 2026.

Required readings:

Cassidy, Elija. "Social networking sites and participatory reluctance: A case study of Gaydar, user resistance and interface rejection." New Media & Society 18, no. 11 (2016): 2613-2628, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444815590341.

Paasonen, Susanna, Vilja Jaaksi, Anu Koivunen, Kaarina Nikunen, Karoliina Talvitie-Lamberg and Annamari Vänskä, Intimate infrastructures we depend upon: Living with data. Media Theory Vol. 7 no. 2 (2023), https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/576/264