Digital Exhaustion
Burnout, Fatigue, and Overload in the Age of Constant Connectivity
Linda Kopitz editor ARE Taylor editor Yiğit Soncul editor Alexandra Kviat editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Intellect
Publishing:17th Aug '26
£109.95
This title is due to be published on 17th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Unpacking the affective toll of constant connectivity, this book reframes digital exhaustion as a defining experience of our times. Overflowing inboxes. Back-to-back Zoom meetings. Nonstop notifications. Daily life in digital culture can be exhausting. This timely and urgent edited collection introduces ‘digital exhaustion’ as a conceptual lens to critically examine the ever-expanding presence of digital technologies in our personal and professional lives. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, this book explores how digital exhaustion is experienced, felt, and articulated in our hyper-connected culture – through burnout, brain rot, binge-watching, data extraction, energy consumption, and social media compulsion. Digital exhaustion emerges as a key structure of feeling in an era of constant connectivity and algorithmic demands. Accessible yet theoretically grounded, this collection is an essential resource for scholars in cultural and technology studies, while also speaking to broader debates in anthropology, psychology, digital geography, urban studies, and consumer research. Responsive to the urgent need to engage in sustained dialogue about digital futures, this book offers fresh insights into how we might understand – and rethink – digital wellbeing, social media addiction, and the growing demand for a right to disconnect.
An essential contribution to the growing literature on "disconnection studies" and computer-induced debility, this collection shines a light on the hidden economies of exhaustion that underpin our hyperconnected society. Its case studies are wide-ranging and surprising: the corporate absurdity of Microsoft’s “virtual commute,” the paradox of “passive” income in influencer culture, the persistence of email overload, and even the soothing yet insistent rhythms of ASMR. Together, they reveal how digital platforms collapse the boundaries between work and leisure, care and consumption, biological and planetary bodies. Digital Exhaustion is both rigorous and attentive—a book that not only diagnoses our age of burnout, but also gestures toward the forms of rest and care that might still be possible. -- Neta Alexander, assistant professor of film and media at Yale University and author of Interface Frictions
'While digital media positions us as users, it has become clear, especially since the pandemic, that we are the ones being used, and used up. This essential volume interrogates how the fatal combination of the internet and capitalism wears us down at work, school, and play, and how even its remedies turn into just another grind.'
-- Gavin Mueller, assistant professor of new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam and author of Breaking Things at Work (Verso 2021).In complete defiance of its topic, this collection summons a furious energy in its account of our digital lives and labors. With depth and originality, each author gives a name to the chronically connected, pandemic-inflected worlds that have once again reframed worker exploitation. It is essential reading for anyone seeking a better grasp of the digital present and future. -- Melissa Gregg, Professor of Digital Futures at the University of Bristol Business School.
ISBN: 9781835952504
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
336 pages