An Ethics of the Ordinary: Reflections on Boredom and Networked Media
Channel: Postdigital Intimacies
Date: 2021-09-09

Dr Tina Kendall, Associate Professor, Film and Media, Anglia Ruskin University


Reflecting on my research into boredom and networked media, this paper rehearses some of the ethical problems that accrue in a postdigital culture around the promise that our media technologies can visualise, classify, sense and even predict our emotions. By looking at boredom-themed content on short-form video platforms Vine and TikTok, I ask what is at stake in the framing of boredom as legible, eventful, and entertaining. Like reaction GIFs, these short videos display a particular fascination with facial expression, actions, gestures, and movements, and a drive to classify, pattern, and synchronise human moods and behaviours. At play is a process of abstraction and reduction, in which lived emotions are tamed and classified, made available for use in networked exchanges, and transformed into a source of profit for social media corporations. I argue that boredom-themed media is particularly interesting because of its fundamental ambiguity, which gives it the potential to work within appropriative structures, or to resist them.

In this talk, I want to reflect on the ethical questions involved in this process of extraction and re-appropriation of human emotions. What does it mean to “feel through” other bodies in networked exchanges? What kind of ethical relations might be established through the naming and sharing of emotions online? What role do the technical affordances of social media platforms play in permitting or limiting ethical responses to the visual display of human gestures, expressions, and movements? The talk goes on to ask how media scholars can attend to such questions in their own research in a way that resists the drive to classify, name and fix their meanings. Here I reflect on what it means as a researcher to speak on behalf of the bored body, given boredom’s constitutive opacity. How can researchers restore the thickness and ambivalence of boredom without re-inscribing the violent logics of classification and surveillance that we are analysing? I conclude that what is needed is an ethics of the ordinary, which might attend to the vulnerabilities, ambiguities and desires that flow through the textures of networked life.



Tina Kendall is Associate Professor of Film & Media at Anglia Ruskin University. She has published in a range of journals, including New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory and Politics, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, and Journal of Film & Media Studies. Her current project, Entertained-or-Else: Boredom and the Affective Technologies of #LockdownLife analyses boredom and networked media, particularly as the relationship between the two have come to be intensified during the Coronavirus crisis.