Introduction

A youth center on the outskirts of Vienna—an unassuming building nestled beside a quiet social housing complex whose large gray concrete walls are sparsely lit by evening streetlights. Suddenly, agitated voices grow louder. Startled, you turn to see a group of young men, all dressed in dark clothes, chasing someone down the empty street. Looking closer, you might recognize Armin, laughing and out of breath, his friends chasing him because he is carrying a packet of dextrose sweets. As on almost every weekday evening, they are heading toward the youth center entrance surrounded by a mural that staff and visitors once painted. When you arrive inside, the rooms feel spacious yet dimly lit, with temporary islands of socializing and noise forming and then dispersing here and there. Brightly colored, donated sofas have been arranged invitingly in circles amid the semidarkness. In one of these quieter corners, you might see Mehti, fifteen years old, an asylum seeker from Chechnya, his face faintly lit by his smartphone screen, bowed downward, shoulders slightly hunched forward. At first glance, a familiar scene slipping easily into cliché: a teenager lost in his phone, settled into a worn sofa, the buzz of voices and clatter of billiard balls echoing around him. He appears distant, disconnected from the world, immersed in an endless stream of images, videos, likes, and alternative lives passing before his eyes. Around him, the space is alive with motion, teenagers drifting between sofas, a staff member tidying behind the alcohol-free bar, laughter ringing from the ping-pong table. Outside, trams weave between Vienna’s concrete apartment blocks, carrying people home for the evening. But inside this free leisure space for children and youths, time feels suspended.

Look beyond the two-dimensional image, though, and there is more to see: A world shaped by tantalizing yet hungry design is also entangled with agency; enlivened by friendships; pierced by schooling, employment, migration, and asylum; and imbued with the rhythms of the broader space and time fabric Mehti is part of. Mehti lives with his parents and six siblings back in their crowded apartment, where four of them share a bedroom. Privacy is rare. But here, alone with his phone, his world narrows to the small glowing screen and the steady rhythm of his thumb scrolling. Surrounded but alone, he is free, a temporary flâneur in a space of his own. In this fleeting moment, togetherness and solitude are stitched together through the act of scrolling, leading to the lingering question: If scrolling is the answer, what is the question?1

This book, based on an ethnography of digital media practices in young people’s lives, starts with a simple premise: It seeks to explore the seemingly effortless motion of scrolling “mindlessly” through smartphone content—a trope that is seemingly easy to moralize about and problematize, but that is harder to think with. But why should something as trivial, fleeting, and detached as the vertical swiping motion of a thumb be of anthropological interest? For an anthropologist, this is certainly not a usual point of departure. It will become clear, however, that this simple motion can tell a much bigger story: not only one of intentionally effortless design, but also one that foregrounds the contexts in which these movements through digital spaces take place. The reader is invited to spend time with young people hanging out in various places around Vienna with their friends, learning about their play, pleasures, concerns, and challenges at a moment of major transition—finishing school and taking first steps toward finding and making sense of employment. As a research focus, scrolling thus attunes us to the casual joys of life in a buzzing (digital) environment that seems full of opportunities, but also—and more prominently in this book—to the inequalities that permeate young people’s everyday lives. In this context, scrolling shifts from a seemingly neutral and barely perceptible movement into a political practice that is inseparable from young people negotiating uncertain futures and, at times, precarity: whether tied to school systems, social mobility, migration, labor conditions, or societal values like the understanding of time and productivity.

It is the latter point that lies at the crux of this book’s main argument. The moment we begin to search for color and texture around movements through digital spaces—that is, when we zoom out from the suspended flow of endless content—we encounter a tension regarding how the time spent with it ought to be used. This suspended time quickly slips into problematic, potent territory: The notion of waste emerges, especially when juxtaposed with the idea that we are missing something vaguely meaningful. Scrolling seems to lead nowhere. It stands as an antithesis to movement and productivity, regardless of the content or context.

This tension becomes particularly palpable when it intersects with seemingly malleable or marginalized populations, such as young people who ought to be molded into productive members of society, members who resist temptations of nonsense, distraction, straying, or criminality. The tension intensifies further when waiting, chronic boredom, and unemployment enter the picture—when ruptured biographies, migration, or racialized exclusion lead to fragmented lives and stalled imaginations of the future. Far from the image of the once promenading privileged aristocratic flâneur, young people strolling through digitalized commercial arcades without a clear purpose often receive far less grace. Yet, as I will argue, the closer we look, the more smartphones or digital media in general fade into the background as neat culprits of doom, which is how they are often portrayed. Instead, we find ourselves confronting the raw face of uncertainties and inequalities—issues far larger than how addictive social media platforms are designed or how time is “wasted” in flânerie through these spaces.

Zooming out from practices like scrolling, without losing sight of their architecture and rhythms, is crucial when considering the expectations placed on young people regarding how they should navigate digitalized space and time. I will argue later that behind the well-intentioned surface of digital empowerment, literacy, and enlightenment, there can also lie culturally embedded fantasies of mastery over space and time. Alongside such fantasies lie assumptions that young people are both passive pawns of the global tech industry yet also potential resistance warriors who ought to fight addiction, hate speech, or fake news, and who are ready to reclaim the space. Everyday life, however, whether digital or analog, does not unfold in superlatives or opposition—it happens in the mundane, effortless space of being, through casual scrolls in between play or microtransactions of money, data, and attention. In this book, I develop this argument along three interlinked strands: (1) the social and political conditions in which mundane digital practices like scrolling take place; (2) the design of porous, playful, and effortless online spaces; and (3) the associated space and time regimes in which digital design, young people and their digital practices are embedded. As the book weaves these strands together, the seemingly trivial practice of scrolling will reveal a deeper political meaning. Before delving into the lived experiences of the young people featured in this book, however, I will first outline the analytical angle by examining the common, historically entrenched tropes surrounding youths’ use of digital media technologies and notions of digital time wasting.

Youths Out of Control

In contemporary Austria, as in many other countries around the world, it is practically impossible to discuss young people’s use of digital media technologies without invoking the persistent image of the dangers of idle “mindless scrolling” bordering on addiction. However, neither digital media practices nor youth as depicted in this mental imaginary and popular trope are universal or fixed concepts; rather, they are constantly evolving and embedded within broader social, political, and historical contexts. The following sections take a first step toward unpacking some of these notions.

Sensationalized Practices

“The telephone mania is among the latest negative results of modern inventions,” proclaimed the opening sentence of an article published in the US newspaper Western Electrician in 1897. Rather grudgingly, the author went on to explain:

The telephone maniacs are usually men of leisure who have small appreciation of the value of time, and the more leisure they have the less hope there is for them, as far as cure is concerned. . . . An unmistakable symptom of the disease is a desire to talk to people at distant points about all sorts of things at all hours of the day or night.

With their “senseless chatter and constant ‘helloing,’” the author states, “they insist on telling long stories over the wire” all the while “regardless of the hour or the pressure of business” (Chatfield 2016). The popularity of such “senseless chatter” was likely the reason that, during the 1918 influenza pandemic, telephone companies urged the public to refrain from telephoning unless “absolutely necessary” to keep manually operated lines clear for doctors and pharmacies (Chatfield 2016). Fast-forward to the 2020s. The chatter has shifted to smartphones and the vast spaces of the internet, which do not discourage but rather profit from people spending time “on the line.” In fact, by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the tables had long since turned, with the use of digital chatter boxes constantly surging. One concern, however, seems to have withstood the test of time: The idea of the “telephone maniacs” still lingers in the popular image of the “smartphone generation” (Twenge 2017), who seemingly cannot stop spending idle time on their telephones, engaging in new manifestations of “senseless chatter.” These digital practices, which include “mindless scrolling,” would likely be considered addictive and devoid of purpose by many educators, policymakers, and youths alike. Indeed, the practices that resemble the “senseless chatter” of “men of leisure” described in 1897 lie at the center of this book. Instead of the “men of leisure,” the protagonists in this book are the Viennese youths I encountered in youth centers, schools, and state-funded employment measures for young people between 2018 and 2023.

In fact, it is not uncommon for media researchers to begin a conversation about new media technologies with such historical examples of objects that were thought to have had an almost mythical capacity to profoundly change what makes us human. It is hard to resist this temptation because the similarity between old and new concerns can be uncanny indeed. Take, for example, the cartoon published in the British satirical magazine Punch in 1906, in which we see a man and a woman in Hyde Park (Baumer 1906). They are sitting together but are facing away from each other. In their laps lies a wireless telegraph, a revolutionary technology at the time. The cartoonist titles the picture: The Development of Wireless Telegraphy. Scene in Hyde Park. He then goes on to explain: “These two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady is receiving an amatory message, and the gentleman some racing results.” Update the Victorian fashion style and the objects in question, and we arrive at the familiar image of broken sociality, of people looking at their smartphones rather than conversing with each other. Later, early telephony experienced a similar crisis—instead of transmitting information as intended by the telephone companies and governments, the telephone became popular as a théâtrophone in France and a pleasure telephone in the UK, transmitting live entertainment as part of subscription packages (Bonea et al. 2019: 63). From Socrates, who feared the demise of the cognitive faculties through the medium of writing, to those who found Elvis Presley’s dancing on television provocative, history is replete with examples of such fears of social change, moral decline, and strange dependencies on new media, and some of these fears persist until today. In the eighteenth century, for example, the German linguist, pedagogue, and publisher Joachim Heinrich Campe defined “reading addiction” as an uncontrolled desire to read—a hedonistic activity of reading novels as opposed to reading religious texts (Scheibenbogen 2022: 14). These historical continuities are not only amusing but also revealing, because they so obviously point to the fact that society’s perception of new technologies is a product of its time.

But they also remind us that disruptions are attributed to certain groups more than others—often it is women who seemed morally jeopardized by the birth of romance novels, unemployed “leisure men” by telephones, and young people by comics, to name just a few examples. The prevailing anxieties of particular time periods are telling. It is hardly a coincidence that Joachim Heinrich Campe also feared that reading addiction would mainly affect women and children because, in his view, men tend to read serious, work-related literature. The authors of the book Anxious Times show how the early twentieth century was characterized by a multitude of fears of overstimulation due to the flood of information enabled by mass media. At the center of these fears were often children and women, whose new appearance and new way of life—thin, short haired, and childless—was interpreted by some as a sign of a nervous disorder that new social-stress factors caused. The ideas of the German and US American conservative psychiatrist Fredric Wertham seem similarly curious. In his influential book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), Wertham feared not only that comics were the source of juvenile delinquency, moral decay, and perversion, but also that young people would be unable to read longer texts once they got used to speech bubbles. He also saw Batman as a “homosexual pedophile” and Wonder Woman as a “man-hating lesbian”. At the height of the comic book condemnation in the US between the 1940s and 1970s, a similar process unfolded in Austria. Richard Bamberger, the leader of the Austrian Youth Book Club, saw himself as a warrior against trivial literature. In cooperation with the Austrian Ministry of Education, he led a campaign called the Big Cleanup, in which schoolchildren could exchange “three junk magazines” (Schundhefte) for a “good book.”2 The “junk” usually consisted of romance novels, westerns, and comics, which, according to an “anti-comic missionary,” led to “stupefaction and total brain softening through text in speech bubbles and brutalization through stick figures” (Bauer and Bauer 2024).

Fast-forward to the anxious 2020s, and hardly a day goes by in Vienna, where I am based at the time of writing, without seeing an alarmist media report about the effects of social media and smartphones on the minds, bodies, empathy, sociality, and basically the ability of children and young people to develop into full human beings. Such tropes are highly pervasive on a global scale. Terms such as the “bowed-head tribe” (低頭族) in Mandarin Chinese, the “thumb tribe” (oyayubizoku) in Japanese, or “smombies” (a combination of smartphone and zombie and the 2015 Youth Word of the Year in Germany) tend to describe young people buried in their smartphones, head down, thumbs scrolling through social media feeds, seemingly unable to resist the lure of the “chattering machines” (Chatfield 2016). Emerging apps targeting young people often quickly slip into a “danger zone” in global media coverage, with press reports linking their use to various moral risks or safety concerns. For example, the US-based dating app Tinder has been associated with “immorality, promiscuity, and danger” (Duguay 2018: 127). Similarly, the anonymous social media platform Yik Yak has drawn criticism for facilitating cyberbullying (Shepherd and Cwynar 2018), while Pokémon Go, a location-based game, has also been deemed problematic for leading young people into potentially dangerous public spaces (Mowlabocus 2018).

Much of the public would agree that social media and smartphones seem to have created “zombified social media addicts” (boyd 2014: 78) who seem to lose control as digital technologies slowly but surely gnaw away at their well-being and mental health (Livingstone and Blum-Ross 2020). The anxiety surrounding new technologies and media is morphing into an updated version of the anxieties of the nineteenth century. For Jonathan Haidt, psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024), young people are at the epicenter of an anxiousness pandemic that is being greatly exacerbated by social media. We learn of disturbing trends of increased suicides, depression, and anxiety diagnoses, all words that weigh heavily. As I write these words, one of the main intellectual left-leaning newspapers in Vienna published a report (Schuhmacher 2024) on the previously mentioned book, titled Why Is Gen Z Depressed, Nervous and Suicidal? The implicit answer: Social media and smartphones are the culprits of doom.

There is an important distinction between the term addiction as used in everyday conversations and addiction as a clinical construct. Like internet addiction, which was originally a satirical term coined by psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg and that came to public attention in 1995, smartphone addiction is a concept more prevalent in popular media than in psychiatry, where it is not (yet) recognized as an addiction. Nevertheless, like internet addiction and mobile phone addiction before it (Bianchi and Phillips 2005; Reid and Reid 2007; Takao, Takahashi, and Kitamura 2009), problematic smartphone behavior has been discussed in a number of international studies that reach varying conclusions (Billieux et al. 2015; Panova and Carbonell 2018). General estimates of internet-related addictions range from 0.8 percent to 26.7 percent (Kuss et al. 2014), including smartphone addiction itself (M. Kwon et al. 2013). In general, authors exploring smartphone-related “addiction,” “dependence,” or “problematic behavior” refer to withdrawal symptoms such as increasing tolerance (usually equated with increasing hours spent online), withdrawal, or orientation to devices and online worlds (Kim et al. 2014). Some of these studies take a rather generous approach to defining addictive behaviors, as in the case of “selfitis” scales designed to measure “addiction to selfies” in a clinical context (Balakrishnan and Griffiths 2018). Although more obscure addictions such as selfitis are likely to share the fate of a few lone papers on “carrot addiction” (Kaplan 1996), the issues addressed here sound familiar. The woman formerly with the telegraph on her lap is now consuming too much social media (social media addiction is more likely to be attributed to women and girls), and the man expecting gambling results is now likely a gamer (gaming addictions are more likely to be attributed to men). Surveys on media use in German-speaking countries echo similar concerns with problematic internet use, mainly based on the amount of time spent online. For example, in the 2020 study by the German Federal Centre for Health Education, the authors claim that 30 percent of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds use the internet in a problematic way, while 8 percent are considered to have an internet-related disorder (Orth and Merkel 2019). The trend is worrying the authors, who emphasize that the numbers have increased in recent years. What many of these studies have in common, however, is that they base their conclusions on time spent online, a highly problematic and outdated measure, given the growing potential of the smartphone to be used for work alongside leisure activities that were once accessed through different media.

Despite the relatively small number of those clinically affected globally (compared with substance abuse, for instance), it is surprising that alarmist perspectives are frequently cited, often in a way that conflates clinical and vernacular contexts and overlooks the cautious statements of psychologists who point out that correlation is not necessarily causation. As the number of mental health problems appears to have increased in recent years, as has the use of digital technologies, many attempts have been made to establish a link between these two developments. The results, however, are not always conclusive because they may be limited in scope, analyze the extent of social media use and not the content, focus only on negative impacts, or fail to consider individual differences or different sociocultural contexts and minorities (D’Arienzo, Boursier, and Griffiths 2019; Ito et al. 2020; Sutton 2020).

Probably the most banal reason for this one-sided representation might be the fact that dramatic stories are indeed more entertaining to read and more likely to go viral. Stories of people falling down a well while taking selfies or spectacular metanarratives of a social crisis are indeed likely to draw more attention than studies that report on how complex and varied people’s use of (digital media) technologies is and was. As the sociologist Judy Wajcman (2014) points out, much of the (gendered) attention is given to spectacular gadgets like motors, computers, and smartphones, while innovations like a condom or a washing machine tend to be overlooked when we think about the groundbreaking impact of technologies on care work throughout history.

Another possible reason why alarming psychological studies of media use, often conducted in a neat world of measurement tools and precise technologies, are arguably overrepresented is that they can satisfy the need of anxious parents craving the scientific certainty of data-driven parenting. And certainty is best provided by precise, quantified, and easily marketable recommendations about how many hours their children should spend online, providing a kind of quantified comfort that we have become accustomed to in biomedicine. But there is more to parents’ concerns. British media scholars Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross (2020) argue, for example, that British parents’ growing fears in relation to “screen time” are also symptomatic of their struggle against the declining welfare state and rising inequalities. In this context, control over screen time appears to be a lever that parents still seem to hold in their hands. In a world that seems to be spinning out of control, regulating screen time and shielding youths from the online world appears as an attainable task for parents and educators. Parents are expected to enable their children to keep up with the ideals of digital literacy, ideals that are particularly difficult for disadvantaged families to achieve (Livingstone and Blum-Ross 2020).

What seems to drive these concerns, I argue, is not only a fear of losing individual autonomy over minds and bodies but also a broader cultural anxiety about relinquishing control—be it over our environment, new technologies, or over the younger generation. Digitalization, much like globalization in earlier decades, becomes the locus for these anxieties: a vast, abstract force that feels as if it is pulling the rug out from under us. As Doreen Massey argues about globalization, this seemingly threatening, abstract cloud over our heads “evokes a powerful vision of an immense, unstructured, free unbounded space and of a glorious complexity” (2005: 81). This imperative to reassert control is particularly visible in the regulation of young people’s media use. In my research in Vienna, I encountered parents who not only monitored their teenagers’ chat messages but also demanded constant updates on their location. These intimate practices of surveillance and regulation, I suggest, reflect an underlying societal effort to manage uncertainty and assert control in the face of rapid social and technological change. Notably, such efforts are not limited to young children who may need guidance but also extend to adolescents and young adults—a group historically constructed as especially susceptible to the purported risks of new media and new freedoms. The brief digression on the emergence of “youth” in Austria that follows will further demonstrate this.

Emerging Youth

At the end of the nineteenth century, “youth” did not exist as a universal concept in Austria. A Romantic concept of middle-class youth, captured by the German word Jünglinge, involved an idea of transition and vulnerability, while working-class youth moved directly from childhood to occupation-based labels such as “apprentice” and “casual laborer” (Wegs 1992: 441). While historians do not necessarily agree on how these class-based categories converged into “youth” as a singular category in Europe, the historian Robert Wegs (1992) argues that social and economic changes at the turn of the century helped to create “youth” as a new cross-class category. Rapid industrialization, the emergence of factory work as opposed to the apprenticeship system, and migration to urban areas permitted young people a new level of economic and social freedom. Such changes are not particularly unusual. Historians writing on the concept of adolescence in Europe note that the ages associated with this category have changed over the centuries, as have societal expectations of work, responsibility, and control. In medieval Europe, for example, the mechanism of apprenticeship marked the boundaries of a period of life in which parental control and rights of discipline were relinquished to “masters” after the parents made an initial payment. For young men, this was a gateway to economic independence, while marriage usually provided an entry point for women. Over the centuries, the conditions of entry into adulthood changed in line with the circumstances. For instance, during the demographic changes caused by plague and labor shortages, young people were sent to apprenticeships later, which also postponed their entry into adulthood and the end of their “adolescence” (Hanawalt 1992). With industrialization, much of Austria’s youth also moved away from the declining artisanal mode of production and into unskilled factory work. This was financially advantageous—they could earn money faster and forgo paying master artisans, a mode of production that was already in decline. It was seemingly a win-win situation, as the factories could make good use of the underpaid and exploited unskilled factory workers. For the adult population, however, this meant new concerns—young people were neither under parental control nor under the control of a substitute master but were instead roaming the streets of Vienna. As the concept of apprenticeship declined, and with it this form of control and discipline, new mechanisms of social control took their place. For the wealthier classes, control could be exercised through inheritance, marriage, and educational expectations. For the working-class youth, the question of control was more complicated, especially as the Industrial Revolution and wage labor led to their increasing independence (Hanawalt 1992).

Such dynamics were not limited to Austria but were also prevalent in Europe and the US during the first decade of the twentieth century, because the increasing visibility of working-class youths and a preoccupation with crime led to them being deemed problematic (Wegs 1992). The perceived increase in juvenile delinquency (which the historian Wegs questions due to changing definitions of crime) led to the emergence of criminology in the US and Europe and studies of juvenile delinquency and defiant behavior (as continued in the Chicago School). In the creation of “problematic youth” as a category, according to the anthropologist Mary Bucholtz, sociology complacently focused on “spectacular and sensational aspects of youth culture,” such as delinquency and deviance, just as anthropologists were drawn to the study of sexuality through cross-cultural comparison, for example, in the influential work of Margaret Mead (Bucholtz 2002: 539). In Austria, the term Jugendliche, denoting working-class youths, started to circulate in the context of juvenile courts amid calls for reformatories (Besserungsanstalten) for juveniles and efforts to control vagrant youths through “vagrancy laws” (Wegs 1992: 443).

While initial efforts to tackle the problem of juvenile delinquency led to punitive measures, the turn of the century also brought new concerns about welfare and alternative approaches to bringing order to the situation in industrial contexts. Experts, including social scientists, reformers, and politicians, began to consider reforming the new class of neglected young factory workers who seemed to lack moral control. Since the legal working age in Austria started at fourteen and workers’ children rarely attended school, the influence of educational institutions was limited. These efforts were accompanied by a more positive view of “youth”—a circumstance that allowed for a more generalized definition of youth beyond the working classes. In and around Vienna, journals, conferences, and publications emerged that addressed various issues concerning young people and offered new ways of molding them into moral citizens. Calls were made for the reintroduction of apprenticeships and the expansion of schooling, as well as efforts to involve working-class youths in activities sponsored by the government, the church, or political parties (Hanawalt 1992; Wegs 1992). Economic and geographical independence also changed the rites of passage, which were no longer collectively controlled by adults but negotiated among peers who engaged in individual experiments with sex, marriage, and alcohol consumption. While earlier escapades were channeled through celebrations such as carnivals, military activities, or fraternities, the youths of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries strolled the streets of European cities and hung out in cafés and cinemas; they began to develop their own styles of dress, and they danced waltz and Charleston, displaying scandalous forms of physical contact (Hanawalt 1992). This situation led to the emergence of a variety of clubs and organizations, from scouts to sports clubs and nature activities to organizations supported by political parties in Austria (Bauer and Bauer 2024).

In Vienna, efforts to curb such scandalous activities were included in the agenda of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria (now the Social Democratic Party of Austria—SPÖ) that was to shape the trajectory of Vienna until today, with the exception of the Nazi period of the 1930s and 1940s. In a period known as Red Vienna, the “red” Social Democrats emerged victorious after World War I, which resulted in the extension of universal suffrage to all citizens, including women. They introduced a myriad of welfare measures. The education system was reformed, subsidized childcare facilities and maternity clinics were set up, and measures to reduce tuberculosis and infant mortality and raise awareness of the importance of dental health followed. In addition to improving working conditions and reducing working hours, the Viennese Social Democrats developed what has become their trademark to this day: housing projects that created sixty-five thousand flats by 1932, housing one-tenth of Vienna’s population. The measures taken to handle the rising population and the housing shortage after World War I were funded through the newly introduced Wohnbausteuer, a housing tax to raise funds for subsidized buildings. After it was recognized that social circumstances and living conditions also led to mental and psychological illness, these efforts were also linked to the goal of creating a healthy population. The new flats were built according to the principles of “light, air, and sunlight,” as a contrast to the earlier dark, overcrowded housing. These efforts were accompanied by campaigns that included exhibitions on how to live, what minimalist furniture to buy, and appeals to avoid nonfunctional decorations and cluttering objects (Bauer and Bauer 2024).

The reformation of the “primitive” and “inadequate” working class and especially of the youth was an explicit part of the agenda of the party leadership, who usually came from privileged circles. In 1929, the newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung celebrated “a decade of cultural progress for the broad masses, from the smoky, dull tavern to the cinema, from the cinema to the football field, from there to the theater, to the books, to the mountains” (Bauer and Bauer 2024, my translation). A number of working-class libraries, including youth libraries, sprang up across the city with the aim of making books and education accessible to the working class, who could not afford books. The libraries, a political endeavor based on voluntary work, curated literature for the working class, while socialist politicians complained about their preference for “trashy literature,” including the popular genres of Wild West or kitsch novels, which were banned from the libraries. In the Bildungsarbeit newspaper published in 1909, the authors wrote: “We want to advise our comrades on what they should read, but also warn them against the frivolous recommendations of booksellers, who all too often succeed in tempting workers to spend their hard-earned money on useless ‘trash’ [Schund]” (Bauer and Bauer 2024, my translation). The advancement of the working class was not only the task of libraries. From the late nineteenth century onward, a large number of clubs for adults, children, and young people emerged, covering everything from sports and nature walks to Esperanto courses, children’s theater, and alcohol abstinence clubs. The working class, it was argued by the public figures of the time, should give up smoking, drinking, and dancing in favor of education, sport, and the enjoyment of proper literature. Slogans like “Thinking workers don’t drink” were common. The city organized a workers’ symphony orchestra, readings, political lectures, theater, cabaret, film, choirs—all with the aim of getting the working class out of the alcohol-infested taverns and getting children and youths off the streets while teaching them healthy habits and good taste. In the “red children’s theater” (“rotes Kasperltheater”), children could play with puppets whose adventures included fighting enemies called the “alcohol ghost,” “nicotine devil,” and “beer witch” (Bauer and Bauer 2024). One could say that such developments led to an unintentionally unified agenda between explicitly socialist and conservative concerns about the sophistication of youthful taste in relation to media consumption—a seemingly overarching national project to create new ideal citizens.

There was another side effect of this change in the preoccupation with “youth” as a category. Under the new scientific focus, the concept of “adolescents” became universalized, and this pushed class-based labels into the background. In the early twentieth century, the concept of adolescence as we know it today started to be built on the idea of a psychological and physiological state of fragility that was reminiscent of Jünglinge from the Romantic period of Sturm and Drang. Adolescence became a purely transitional state on the path to adulthood, a state of becoming rather than being. A state in which, in a Western biomedical perspective, a seemingly biological fragility heightens the tension between individual agency and structural constraints imposed by social institutions—in other words, a time of crisis and psychological distress (Bucholtz 2002). The state of this seemingly universal adolescence has been heavily critiqued by anthropologists, who frame adolescence as culturally shaped rather than solely a biological phase. It is, therefore, a concept that varies across cultural and historical settings (Jenkins and Csordas 2020). Yet, despite this evidence, adolescence is now further biologized by the neuroscience of the “teenage brain” and exacerbated by popular science publications on the subject—a genre that promises to offer comfort and relief to parents struggling to cope with changing relationships with their teenagers. This transitional period of becoming, hence, is now one of turbulence and vulnerability.

If we add to this vulnerability and instability the threat of the dangers of addiction and predators lurking in the vast internet space, the result seems, unsurprisingly, explosive. Within this context, the turbulence of youth has to be tamed, along with the internet. Young people’s well-being now seems especially challenged in the face of the predatory technological worlds that prominent scholars have warned about: a world where surveillance, behavioral cues, dark patterns, and nudges built into screens limit our autonomy and agency in increasingly intelligent environments. Ironically, Silicon Valley professionals, some of whom are now vocal critics of the technologies they helped create, play an important role in these narratives—demonstratively shielding their children and banning them from using digital technologies at home (Alter 2017). When the alchemists of our time warn us to stay away from a potion they have concocted, we are inclined to listen. In some ways, I will argue, the echoes of the concerns evident in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century are still evident today. Waltz and the Charleston have morphed into TikTok reels,3 but the implicit concern with fast and flawed entertainment is now associated less with “working classes” and more with the awkward categories of “lower socioeconomic background” and “migrant background” (an awkwardness I will admit to reproducing at times).

Youths in Control?

In contrast to much of the psychological work on problematic digital media use, the empirical strands of science and technology studies (STS), media studies, and the social sciences, including anthropology (the primary lens taken in this book), tend to paint a more optimistic picture of “users.” In these (usually qualitative) studies, users emerge not as homogenized victims of digitalization but as social actors sitting in the “control hub” (Miller et al. 2021: 94) of their digital media use. Research on digital media technologies builds on earlier work on media in general, which tends to go beyond analyzing media texts and media production and emphasizes the context in which media play a role in people’s lives in a holistic way. Here, the complexity, relativism, and situatedness of media practices come alive through the empirical grounding of “intimate methods” (Peterson 2005: 120; see also, for example, Brauchler and Postill 2010; Costa et al. 2022; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002).

Similarly, much of the current literature within social science approaches to “the digital” attributes active appropriation of digital technology to “users,” noting that there is nothing inevitable or deterministic about technology (Budka 2019). Often such research presents counterarguments to the pessimistic views expressed in much of the public debate on digital practices. A growing body of research has now contributed to a more nuanced understanding of adolescents’ online practices (Archambault 2017; Baym 2015; boyd 2014; Crawford and Robinson 2013; Gasser and Palfrey 2008; Gershon 2012; Ito et al. 2010; Livingstone 2009; Livingstone and Blum-Ross 2020; Schreiber 2020; Slama 2010). In their comparative study, Miller et al. (2016), for instance, turn the narrative of social media as socially disruptive on its head and instead describe How the World Changed Social Media by demonstrating how digital practices or the meaning and appropriation of digital spaces vary depending on the social and cultural context they are embedded in. Here, universal users become complex sociocultural actors whose practices defy any attempt to capture them in universal questionnaires, speculation about media effects, or simple explanations. While social media might be used to organize democratic activities in one place, they might be used to surveil and control political opposition in another. As anthropological research indicates, people appropriate technologies and make them their own all over the world, perhaps as tools for sociality rather than isolation when staying in touch with family members in extended families and in the context of transnational migration (Ahlin 2023; Hromadžić and Palmberger 2018; Leurs 2015; Madianou and Miller 2013). People also use them as a liberating tool in conservative settings in which phones provide young women and LGBTQIA+ individuals with sites for safe agency (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington 2007; Willis 1977). Restricted mobility, be it in old age, in the context of disability, or in hospital beds can sometimes be mitigated by expanded possibilities of smartphone-mediated interaction (Ginsburg 2020; Miller et al. 2021). Yet this does not mean that the materiality of media or effects should be sidelined (Postill 2022; Tenhunen 2008). As Jo Tacchi notes, “Media is determined by culture, and at the same time it makes culture” (2012: 238).

This book is primarily situated within digital anthropology, but it also considers extensive work from fields such as media studies, STS, sociology, history, urban studies, human geography, computer science, design, and psychology. It is certainly not an appeal against empirical research into the problematic effects of smartphones and internet use and the experience of compulsion and loss of control among those affected by clinical addiction.4 Much less is it a declaration that many of the frequently expressed concerns are illegitimate or to be labeled as hysteria. Rather, it is an exploration of the gray area where digital media practices are on the cusp of being defined as problematic. What is interesting here, in particular, is the question: Who has the authority to interpret what is normal or problematic? Can we rely on top-down definitions and arbitrary judgments of what constitutes problematic screen time? And if we do so, what are the consequences? Do we need to examine the underlying assumptions when problematizing and regulating the practices of particular groups, especially given the history of power dynamics and sensationalism in the intersection between youth constructs and media use?

After all, those most vulnerable to smartphone addiction seem to be the disadvantaged groups. Min Kwon et al. (2013), researchers who came up with the smartphone addiction scale (SAS), conclude, for example, that

people with a low level of education . . . are more likely to become addicted to smartphone use. . . . This may be because people with a low level of education may lack self-control, which has been suggested as a risk factor for game addiction. (6)

Few would deny that life circumstances such as poverty, precarity, discrimination, unemployment, low-quality housing, or poor access to health services contribute to mental health issues for obvious reasons. It is, however, the link between socioeconomic status, low education, and a lack of self-control that sets alarm bells ringing for social scientists, especially given the long history of attributing a lack of discipline, morality, and control to the working class (and youths), as briefly outlined earlier. Such a perspective not only fails to consider complexities of exclusion but also sidelines research suggesting that digital media can particularly benefit marginalized and vulnerable groups (Ito et al. 2010, 2018, 2020).

Such attempts to objectively determine what counts as time (un)well spent are implicitly based on sociocultural norms of competent and healthy engagement with digital media technologies. This can be seen, for example, in the discourses on digital literacy, when disadvantaged young people are benevolently described as deficient in order to highlight digital divides and inequalities. International surveys in the context of digital literacy emphasize concerns that disadvantaged youths are likely to spend time with “entertainment-oriented” rather than “information-oriented” technologies (van Dijk 2017). Certain so-called active and enabled (Gardner and Davis 2013) digital practices, such as creating a website or posting on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), are seen to alleviate the new forms of the digital divide and thus encourage social mobility, particularly among marginalized youths (van Dijk 2017). If time is to be spent online, it should ideally happen in healthy and efficient ways, with the right tools for homework and critical thinking rather than passive consumption. One remedy, according to Silicon Valley experts themselves, lies in different technology. An initiative called Time Well Spent was founded in 2013 by Tristan Harris, a former product manager for Google and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. The initiative’s name is telling: Time spent with attention-seeking digital devices engineered by the powerful actors of Silicon Valley is not “well” spent. Time must be managed—often with further, optimized technical solutions now induced via ethical rather than purely commercial agendas and often relying on the same kind of gamified design they critique (Beattie and Daubs 2020). At the policy level, such as within the European Union (EU), the rhetoric of active empowerment reflects a similar hope for control. In the EU initiative Better Internet for Children (BIK+), the solution involves not only creating a safer internet (Action Pillar 1) but also empowering and actively engaging children and young people (Action Pillars 2 and 3) (European Commission n.d.). Here, empowerment seems to be a promising remedy against the loss of control if young people just learn enough about the digital worlds.

The solutions to problems associated with the internet, hence, seem to lie in the promise of agency. However, much of the current policy work focusing on digital empowerment and literacy rarely examines the actual social context in which agency is ascribed to and taken away from young people, especially when they appear to be vulnerable, undereducated, and disadvantaged. Although “screen time” seems to be defined primarily as a universal measure of quantifiable units of time, the term hides a multitude of digital activities ranging from scrolling through videos to sending a funny picture to friends, keeping in touch with parents or homelands, or sharing a solution to math homework. Tuning out the world via the screen can be both a consequence and a goal. Empowerment or agency cannot be separated from it, because they are not neutral concepts. Agency for what? To do what? To do the right thing? But what is the “better thing,” the right thing, to do, and who decides that? If young people learn all about data practices, will they still refuse to use a popular social media platform even though everyone else is there? If they learn about the dangers and dark corners of the internet, is that not even more of a reason to go there? Danger can be a place to hide from adults and experiment with bad decisions. I have met young people who might not be able to format a Microsoft Word document, but who have committed credit card fraud on the dark web—using the stolen money to buy crisps at the supermarket. Is this self-determination and empowerment? Does empowerment mean that construction workers, who have no choice but to stick to their precarious, seasonal jobs after leaving a flawed and unjust school system, should optimize their LinkedIn profile? Does empowerment and visibility in digital spaces mean that a child who has suffered a lifetime of xenophobia, racism, or pressure to assimilate suddenly feels comfortable showing their “authentic” self on social media? And what precisely makes time not “well spent” in the context of chronic unemployment?

Wasting Time

“I am simply on the phone . . .” said Marko,5 an eighteen-year-old student, during an interview at a Viennese school while the voices of his peers could be heard faintly in the background. Marko was describing what he usually does when he is on his smartphone. He continued: “. . . wasting time for nothing really. And I think it’s a shame because I could have learned something or done something useful in that time, but it is what it is . . . you get under this spell.” This sense of guilt and lost time is certainly not unique to Marko but is familiar to many of the users of digital media technologies whom I encountered during my research between 2018 and 2023. The notion of wasted time is also present in various surveys of young people’s use of digital media technology. The representative German JIM (Jugend, Information, Medien) study, conducted annually for over twenty years to date, introduced a question about time wasting for the first time in its 2019 survey. According to their data, 71 percent of those aged twelve to nineteen believed that they “waste their time on apps and online communities” (Feierabend, Rathgeb, and Reutter 2020). The Austrian initiative saferinternet.at conducted a similar (nonrepresentative) survey in 2019, which found that 60 percent of young people aged eleven to seventeen agreed with the statement that they spend too much time online. And a 2018 study by the German Institute for Trust and Security on the Internet (Deutsches Institut für Vertrauen und Sicherheit im Internet; DIVSI) similarly reported that 64 percent of young people aged fourteen to twenty-four (N=576) feel they spend too much time online (2018: 12). In participatory workshops that I conducted with colleagues in Vienna, we also asked school students if they felt they were wasting time online. One participant commented, “Oh yeah, I invest way too much time on YouTube. I waste one hundred percent of my lifetime.”

Another added, “Yes, for me, Instagram and YouTube take too much time from me. I think it would be better to do something that would require more creativity. But instead, I do nothing.” It is obvious from such studies and responses that the notion of time wasting is also highly prevalent in young people’s narratives in Austria.

So how can we explain this apparent contradiction between the perception of wasted time and the enormous popularity of digital practices such as scrolling through images and videos? Can we reconcile previous empirical research on active media users and the widespread assumption that people, especially younger generations, are mesmerized by the irresistible spell of digital media technologies, be they in Ghana (Burrell 2008), Niger (Masquelier 2019), or Austria? And why is the topic of wasting time so omnipresent and persistent? Why, when thinking and writing about media practices, does hardly anyone recount anecdotes from the instances when they did not use their smartphones in their everyday lives (except from sporadic, stylized digital detox experiences)? In this book, I approach these questions by examining how these ephemeral digital practices are embedded in the everyday lives of the people I met during my ethnographic research. What do fuzzy practices such as scrolling through endless social media feeds, or “wasting time on nothing,” mean at the micro level and beyond spectacular metanarratives? How do these practices play out in everyday life, and what lies behind the “spell” that Marko spoke of?

There will inevitably be ambiguous answers to these questions. Ambiguities are also reflected in studies such as the German Institute for Internet Trust and Safety’s 2018 survey in which two-thirds of young people aged fourteen to twenty-four may have agreed that they were wasting time online. However, in the same survey, aptly titled The Generation Internet: Between Happiness and Addiction, 69 percent of participants also agreed that the internet makes them “happy” (Deutsches Institut für Vertrauen und Sicherheit im Internet 2018: 12)—a sentiment that makes for less interesting headlines. It is not my intention to reproduce a stereotypical tech industry narrative that celebrates connectivity and progress. Instead, I wish to complicate the black-and-white juxtaposition of guilt and happiness. Before going into more detail about how I approach these ephemeral practices, I will briefly outline some of the features of time-capturing design built into our devices.

Screens as Captors of Time

The preoccupation with the intertwining of time and technologies is no coincidence, as the exploration of “acceleration” is inextricably linked to technologies that not only seem to profoundly change how time is spent, managed, and prioritized but that are also marketed in terms of speed (Wajcman 2014). Behind these concerns lies an iceberg of industry practices designed to leverage time and to engage and “capture attention,” to use the classic terms employed by marketing consultants and the stakeholders in the attention economy (Davenport and Beck 2001) who rely on “persuasive design” (Fogg 2009). Widely read books such as Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Eyal 2014) advise the digital advertising industry on how to act like a predator on a quest to hook the attention of potential “targets” (that is, customers). In contrast to earlier marketing practices that relied on crude demographic data, online spaces have multiplied the ways to target diverse audiences enormously. Echo chambers have allowed parallel worlds to coexist in the same neighborhoods and households, while users spread across the vast internet have become more difficult to “capture” and categorize. These developments also meant that advertisers—or platforms that enable advertising, like Facebook6—need to advance their strategies and map out the social spaces in which their customers move. To do this, they collect customer data to understand the habitus of their users and ultimately tap into target audiences to sell advertising space with greater leverage. On Snapchat, a multimedia messaging app, for example, advertisers could preselect potential target groups to whom they would display advertising messages. The categories have long surpassed simple age and gender and now include long lists of categories ranging from “meme watchers” to “high schoolers” or “sharply dressed men.” In December 2020, for example, Snapchat’s users with a business account could choose between “shopping mall shoppers,” “luxury shoppers,” or “discount or thrift store shoppers.” The personal information that assigns users to the respective categories is collected on the platform itself and shared between websites via browser cookies or app-based advertising IDs.

This intricate collection of information is not only based on data that users actively enter (for instance, likes of specific posts and pages); it also consists of metadata that fills in the information gaps by, for example, drawing inferences from a user’s social networks, or capturing the timing and duration of the user’s engagement with specific content, including the exact movements of their fingers (Pavan 2020; Razaghpanah et al. 2018). Our digital devices are designed to constantly leak data, without which the internet would not function (Chun and Friedland 2015). Addressing the uncanny sense that something is continually tracking and watching us, leaking information as we navigate online spaces (Paasonen 2018), media and technology scholars have critiqued the invisible infrastructures beneath the designed surface of such carefully constructed spaces. Harry Brignull (2011), for example, coined the term “dark patterns” to address the aspects of digital design that lead users to take actions contrary to their interests. One example of such dark patterns is the ubiquitous cookie notice designed to make it easier, more convenient, and more attractive for the user to accept it (and thus allow user behavior to be tracked). It contrasts with the inconvenient searching for other options required to opt out. Our gaze is usually drawn to the button that accepts all cookies, while the alternatives remain on the margins of our vision.

Again, screens that persuade, and that capture time and attention are not fundamentally new. The advent of new mass media such as television relied on screens that convert attention into time—the number of viewers who tune in was and still is an essential metric in the television industry. Nowhere is this transaction more visible than in the screens of gambling machines, which offer playful engagement and thrills in exchange for a certain amount of money instantly transferred through physical coins. In casinos, the term “time on device” is used as a concrete metric to estimate the profitability of a gambling machine: Increased time on the device is directly associated with financial gains for the casino (Schüll 2012). Given the commercial importance of screen time (time spent online or on a device) for social media platforms and the accusation of the addictive properties of captivating screens, it is hardly surprising that parallels have been drawn with the gambling industry (Lewis 2017). For example, the anthropologist Natasha Schüll (2012, 2016) describes how the increased and commercially successful reliance on big data and video screens (mainly to appeal to the next generations of gamers) in gambling is historically and geographically linked to general innovations in the design of video games and digital interfaces. After all, designers of digital screens learn from each other and employ similar behavioral models rooted, for instance, in “persuasive design” (Fogg 2009) and “nudging” (Thaler and Sunstein 2009).7 Comparisons between social media and gambling are sometimes vocally drawn by Silicon Valley developers themselves. The critics gathered in the Center for Humane Technology, for example, view certain design mechanisms behind social media as either designed to be addictive or maintained precisely because of their addictive qualities. One such example is the pull-to-refresh mechanism invented by Loren Brichter. In a 2017 interview by The Guardian, Loren Brichter, a Silicon Valley developer, is quoted as saying that pull to refresh is addictive (Lewis 2017). He developed the feature to refresh his app’s feed because he could not find a place for a refresh button. Pull to refresh allowed users to refresh the feed by dragging it down with their thumbs. Twitter (now X) later acquired Brichter’s start-up and integrated the feature into the Twitter platform. Nowadays the mechanism is no longer necessary, because pages can be updated automatically. It is still widely used, however—a fact that seemed to puzzle Brichter in an interview with The Guardian. For Tristan Harris, former product manager at Google, the reason is the addictive nature of the feature. He said that “each time you’re swiping down, it’s like a slot machine. You don’t know what’s coming next. Sometimes it’s a beautiful photo. Sometimes it’s just an ad” (Lewis 2017). This seemingly simple feature exemplifies how subtle design choices embed addictive rhythms into everyday digital gestures—rhythms that extend beyond pull to refresh to shape the very practices of scrolling, swiping, and interacting with screens more broadly. Nevertheless, as I will demonstrate in chapters 4 and 5, cunning marketing practices and persuasive design do not necessarily mean they are perfectly executed, nor that young users are oblivious to them.

Scrolling and Swiping

The mechanical movements of scrolling and swiping may seem inconsequential, but it is here that current technological trends, designer intentions, and business models are translated into embodied practice. Their somewhat rhythmic quality, along with the inevitable joy of social connectedness associated with effortless scrolling and snapping, is an undeniably potent mix. In this sense, scrolling, swiping, but also practices like playing are a lens through which the space between youths and screens comes to life. As anthropologists and ethnographers, we are specialized in seeing more in those moments that might be discarded as trivial. Ethnography, as a methodology that makes sense of the mundane, magnifies those fleeting practices. By doing so, those practices are turned upside down, given color and nuance that gets lost in the colloquial labels of addiction. Through a critical lens, the trivial becomes political and “nothing” becomes meaningful.

These are the kinds of digital practices that filled in the gaps of waiting, distraction, or boredom that accompanied me everywhere during fieldwork. Young people were regularly scrolling through social media apps like Instagram,8 swiping through endless feeds of short videos or engaged in short bouts of mobile play. These observations were consistent with a small nonrepresentative survey that I conducted with colleagues in several Viennese schools, in which the students were asked when and where they usually play mobile games. The majority reported that they play mobile games while waiting or during breaks, when they are bored, commuting, before bed, and on the toilet (Göbl et al. 2020). In other words, moments that play along with the “rhythms of everyday life” (Paasonen 2018: 222). This in-betweenness enables copresence, much like the postcard once introduced the in-between of public and private, of “being here and yet there, being present whilst simultaneously absent” (Hjorth 2005; Pink, Horst, et al. 2016). Nowhere and everywhere at once, such practices are both ephemeral and ubiquitous. They are not, however, simply mechanical enablers of movement through spaces and atmospheres. They transcend space as the thumb moves in and across the screen, and yet through them space emerges in the relational process of dwelling. These practices can take place in a concentrated playful experience that lasts for hours or, alternatively, within a few seconds of carelessly scrolling through social media feeds. They can be deeply meaningful or utterly boring. In short, they seem to have little in common beyond representing ways of moving through digital spaces, no less trivial than walking, except that the digital dimension now augments the sidewalk as we walk. Yet this very triviality, as this work seeks to show, is illuminating.

Given the ephemeral nature of such practices, which seem semiconscious, banal, and elusive, it is hardly surprising that they have received little attention from social sciences like anthropology. As Kristian Møller and Brady Robards note, “Small-scale media-body interactions—such as swipes and scrolls—are often left unexplored due to them being between the intent of the user and a measurable action in the interface” (2019: 96). Moreover, these small-scale somatic and digital movements are sometimes too ephemeral, making them difficult to track and archive. They seem to float in the space between users and “measurable intent” (96). Such practices slip into a disciplinary no-man’s-land, because precision comes at a price. The closer we investigate digital design, the easier it seems to lose sight of the holistic, “non-digital-centric” approach (Pink, Horst, et al. 2016) that places digital practices in a larger social, cultural, historical, or political context, as is common within social sciences. In that context, scrolling seems oddly mechanical and out of place when divorced from the content fleetingly being flipped through. So how do we go about it?

In the spirit of typical ethnographic research in which the everyday is an essential part of the ethnographic experience, anthropologists studying digital technology have meticulously examined “the everyday” (Pink et al. 2017) and “the intangible” (Pink, Sinanan, et al. 2016) in order to capture the appropriation and integration of digital technology into everyday life. Elsewhere, in their study of cycling and self-tracking, Pink et al. suggest that “by revealing and explaining the routines, contingencies and accomplishments of everyday life as they unfold, we can examine why mundane data matter in their very ordinariness” (2017: 4). The mundane is not defined here in contrast to the spectacular, but rather as “open and leaky” (9), a dynamic site of production for the visible and impactful (Pink et al. 2019: 103). In Second Life, for instance, a formerly popular video game that relies on the idea of the “everyday” in its essence, players can select characters, build a house, and interact with others, much like in “real life.” Tom Boellstorff (2008) was one of the first to argue in his significant research on Second Life that players not only play the game but also inhabit the spaces of their communities as residents participating in neighborhood activities. For players, Second Life is not a spectacular or parallel replica of a real world, but an extension of mundane interactions. Rather than only indulging in cybersex and other scandalized activities often reported in the media, much of their activities were the mundane everyday practices of building, trading, or socializing. The microcosm of the smartphone—as a bridge linking the user to a broad spectrum ranging from spectacular Instagram posts, viral moments, massive online events, and rituals to the act of scrolling through social media feeds in a moment of boredom—is no exception. These points on the spectrum can also overlap because a moment of casual scrolling can lead to something more spectacular. Its mobility allows it to become intimately embedded in the mundane routines and acts of care. These everyday care practices, including regular check-ins and the organization of daily life, whether in relation to doing laundry or bringing and picking up family members, are mundane in nature and rarely consist of spectacular acts.

They often remain obscure and implicit, seemingly unworthy of attention; they are seldom mentioned by interlocutors, although they are not necessarily private (Pink et al. 2019: 102–3). For Miller et al. (2021), for example, the success of messenger applications such as WhatsApp lies in the fact that these tools enable trivial daily exchanges among extended family members. Whereas special events such as Christmas holidays and birthdays had a more formal air before the advent of digital messengers, spaces such as WhatsApp enabled more trivial and thus regular exchanges where jokes and photos of meals could be shared instantly. This mundane entanglement can also provide access to populations for whom participation in public and perhaps more distant or constrained sites of the internet represents a hurdle. In their research with women in India, Radhika Gajjala and Tarishi Verma (2018) argue that low-threshold apps like WhatsApp were crucial in increasing digital participation for women by facilitating private conversations embedded within multiple (transnational) networks while also enabling them to communicate in a more free and expressive manner, choosing with whom to connect. In other words, the digital is quickly becoming the everyday and vice versa (Horst and Miller [2012] 2020b: 29).

This shift toward everyday digital interactions is also reflected in the evolving nature of software distribution, where apps transformed from costly preinstalled programs into accessible, low-cost, and neat, tiny packages seamlessly integrated into daily life. Typically free or inexpensive (unlike the earlier costly software packages), these apps were often unremarkable in themselves, yet they catered to a broad range of everyday needs, from personal organization to niche hobbies like birdwatching (Morris 2018: 93). Jeremy Morris (2018) draws a parallel between the microfunctionalities of apps and the rise of coin-operated vending machines in nineteenth-century England, which filled public spaces, offering trivial commodities ranging from gum to tobacco for impulse purchase. The significance of apps thus lies less in their individual content or design and more in their seamless integration into countless everyday routines and environments (Morris 2018; Morris and Murray 2018). Here is where the mundane becomes political not only because it tells us something about routines or relationships, but also because it is very much a deliberate part of the design. After all, digital design is intent on reducing frictions for the user, becoming seamlessly integrated into those routines and relationships—rarely through sudden disruption, but through one careful, barely noticeable update at a time.

Nonevents

Everyday life is full of seemingly insignificant moments—waiting in line, absent-minded scrolling, a quiet glance at a screen—that often slip past our attention. Yet it’s precisely these “in-between” fragments of experience and fleeting pauses that can reveal much more about our engagement with the digital than spectacular digital practices. Guided by the concept of “Non-Events” developed by ethnologists Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren (2010), I turn my gaze to those uneventful, elusive aspects of life—what is usually brushed aside as trivial or empty time. In The Secret World of Doing Nothing—their study of waiting, routines, and daydreaming—Ehn and Löfgren set out to “capture moments not worth paying attention to,” and they call these moments “non-events.” In doing so, the authors leave aside the “explicit, dramatic and eventful” and focus on the “uneventful, ephemeral, and elusive” to unearth meaning in otherwise unnoticed moments and phenomena that are deemed not worthy of attention (2010: 4). Although the concept is linguistically similar to “non-places” (Augé 1995), it is not concerned with delegitimizing the existence of rich spaces. On the contrary, it sets out to emphasize the richness, situatedness, and historicity behind the apparent triviality. As the authors note, such uneventful events “seem totally devoid of class, hierarchy or marginalization,” which makes them fascinating sites of inquiry. Therefore, paying attention to the subtlety of the intangible can help us understand the micropolitics of seemingly apolitical nonevents (Ehn and Löfgren 2010: 214). Throughout this book, I make use of the idea of nonevents to explore how the mundane, everyday interactions young people have with digital media—so often dismissed as unremarkable—reveal the complexities of control, agency, and negotiation that underpin both digital life and broader social dynamics.

The idea of nonevents is a helpful starting point for looking into everyday practices such as scrolling. After all, such “small-scale” (Møller and Robards 2019: 96) digital practices cannot be related or restricted to a particular community, a piece of textual or multimedia content, or specific events. Instead, they are the kind of ubiquitous, in-between nonevents, similar to daydreaming, routines, and waiting, that Ehn and Löfgren (2010) explored in terms of their seeming triviality and social history. Daydreaming, for instance, has been associated with danger throughout Western history. In the European aristocracy, wealthy young women were once feared to be “trapped in the fantasy world, with idleness and boredom as unhealthy platforms for fantasy” (Ehn and Löfgren 2010: 207). At the same time, media such as books and television often played a scapegoating role and were seen as limiting imagination—something that reappeared in anxieties about immersive video games (173). Routines, write the authors, are also not immune to the dangers of idle time. Mass media such as television and radio have historically been considered to be dangerous distractions from ironing or doing homework in the West (107). While the term multitasking was only popularized in the first decade of the twenty-first century, alongside debates about stress and burnout (109), public discourses on routines and distractions are often found in the realm of new media and technologies. Indeed, probably never more so than with smartphones, because they can be carried around, helping people perform routine tasks at any time of day and in any location, including waiting rooms. Waiting is the third type of nonevent Ehn and Löfgren focus on. As the authors point out, “the choreography of waiting is rich” (13), while waiting, and by extension boredom, are also embedded in historical discourses of time and discipline (28). As such, these types of nonevents lie at the analytically rich crossroads of everyday design and social relations, in which waiting and boredom have a broader relevance beyond a simple interpretation as two-dimensional meaningless time spent waiting for the bus. Here, “wasting time” online is transformed from a meaningless, trivial “doing nothing” to a convenient analytical category.

The parallel between waiting, routines, and daydreaming on the one hand, and scrolling or swiping on the other, is hardly coincidental. Throughout the fieldwork, I observed repeatedly how scrolling—sometimes inattentive and repetitive, sometimes focused—is an activity usually embedded in waiting, routines, and daydreaming. As with the nonevents discussed by Ehn and Löfgren (2010), they resemble nondramatic, barely noticeable events that are seemingly not worth paying attention to. A quick scroll through an app is much less visible than the construction of a highly visible online community that catches the eyes of scholars and might be easier to define. By relying on the explicit notion of nonevents, I aim to explicitly highlight the analytical value of such ephemeral moments, rather than merely using them as a springboard to get to the interesting, spectacular events. The concept of nonevents also diminishes the pressure to define and construct “events” in an environment where users constantly switch between online and offline, just as they move in and out of playful and nonplayful spaces. Throughout the fieldwork, engagement with the smartphone was mostly defined by moments of parallel engagement, interruptions, and smooth transitions between platforms and modes of interaction, both online and offline. When my interlocutors talked about smartphone use, they rarely framed it as events—“I was on Instagram” is meaningful, but it is not necessarily an event, nor even a description of dwelling in a particular space. Instead, the smartphone is integrated into everyday life through quick, not always carefully choreographed movements of entry and exit: It is quickly picked up from the table, put away, and used alone, in company, on the bus, on the toilet, or during school lessons. This integration into everyday life is greatly aided by prevailing design choices that allow such activities to be interruptible and resumable (Hjorth and Richardson 2014: 39). Most messenger apps, such as WhatsApp, “remember” what was written after a pause, while mobile games use shorter game intervals and frequent checkpoints to allow users to pick up later where they left off. The ability to play, type, or scroll for even a few seconds while going to the bathroom makes it a profoundly different kind of event to an hour-long immersive game in a World of Warcraft role-playing world with a guild.

Importantly, noneventful does not mean trivial. Looking at digital practices as mundane, banal, incidental, or ephemeral risks sounding pejorative and dismissive, or it risks creating a dichotomy between trivial and meaningful. As the concept of nonevents implies, however, it is not the meaninglessness but the “secret world” behind such practices that makes them an analytically compelling case—especially when triviality is assigned to practices of certain groups. Examples of this underlying assumption can be found not only in historical records of public figures who lament the trivial media consumption of women, children, or the working class, but also in anthropological research. Clifford Geertz, for instance, characterized machine gambling as “mindless” and as associated with women, children, youths, and the poor in contrast to the serious business of cockfighting, which was popular among the “cockfighting men” who he and his wife studied in Bali. Among the “cockfighting men,” Geertz sees a profound psychological identification with the “deep play” of cockfighting, an affair he elaborates on affectionately in great detail, while the “shallow play” of money gambling on the periphery of the cockfighting remains invisible and unworthy of his analysis. The “deep play” in his account becomes a nuanced social arena that stands in sharp contrast to other practices that appear one-dimensional and devoid of meaning and that are avoided by the “cockfighting men” as shameful (Schüll 2012).

The emphasis on the mundane and uneventful can be seen as an alternative to the narratives of postmodernism, described as disruptive and characterized by the “rise of individualism and fragmentation of social life” (Ehn and Löfgren 2010: 207). As Ehn and Löfgren note, metanarratives of individualization can appear unbalanced because of the focus on the “dramatic, eventful, and highly visible” (2010: 207). In the trajectories-prone public discourse in the West (Appadurai 2012), the ideally digitally proficient and empowered human features at the pinnacle of the metanarrative of social fragmentation and individualization, without much room for ambiguities and contradictions. When it comes to this kind of individualized, digitally optimized, and networked personhood, much spotlight is placed on highly visible Instagram communities, filters, influencers, fake news, AI technologies, activism, and other apparently more exciting areas of the internet. Focus on the mundane illuminates the other side of the coin: the casual, boring, and uneventful moments that are as much a part of a digitalized present and future as are selfies. It joins the quintessential anthropological efforts to bring the diversity of perspectives into the narrative. While doing so, the challenge is not to turn complex social actors into disembodied entities that exist only through social activity. They also interact with intimate material worlds that are deeply ambient, playful, sensory, affective, and enchanting—yet also intertwined with commercial interests and pragmatic design considerations.

Although screens indeed play a central role in this book, I am not writing about screens per se. Like much anthropological work on the digital, the focus begins with the digital but quickly decenters it. What starts with scrolling opens a gateway into the lived realities of young people—their struggles to find a job or apprenticeship, their navigation of pressures and expectations placed on them before adulthood has even begun. Attending closely to their digital practices reveals moments that can be spectacularly boring or surprisingly comforting, yet these everyday interactions also uncover deeper historical and discursive meanings related to boredom, productive time, and the politics of leisure, class, migration, and space. In this way, the monolithic concepts of youth and screens begin to crumble, and the ubiquitous smartphones become a part of everyday struggles, guilty pleasures, and small comforts, rather than a corrupting wave washing over humanity, leaving fragmented selves and social isolation in its wake.

Rather than positioning everyday life as opposed to big tech or industry designers’ ambitions, this book will demonstrate how daily routines blend effortlessly with digital flows. Digital environments here are not battlegrounds for activism, empowerment, or constant self-improvement; instead, they hum subtly with casual activity, fleeting boredom, moments of respite, and occasional political indifference. The young people I encountered did not dwell in “unproductive” digital spaces due to lack of skill, ambition, or digital literacy, nor merely as victims of addictive design, but because such engagement reflected what made sense within their particular circumstances. Efforts to frame every digital moment as a site for empowerment or entrepreneurial transformation often miss the comfort, rhythm, and ordinary life that shape most interactions with technology. By focusing on these often-overlooked gestures and routines, I invite readers to see digital engagement as a lived, adaptive part of how young people navigate opportunity, expectation, and constraint within their social worlds. This focus transforms practices that are usually dismissed or ignored into a crucial lens for understanding the subtle complexities of contemporary life.

The Field

The stories, quotes, observations, snippets of conversations, and interactions presented in this book are based on ethnographic fieldwork and participatory design research with young people in Viennese youth centers, schools, and at a government-funded employment lab working with young people in the transition phase between school and work—spaces that will be described further throughout the chapters. These insights, gained through several projects between 2018 and 2023, depended on these institutions and local staff kindly allowing my—frankly not very useful—presence after complying with their respective ethical and institutional procedures. Above all, however, this type of research depended on the openness of young people to share their practices, their concerns, and simply their everyday lives with me—an act of trust that cannot be taken for granted. This trust was sometimes shaken by adults and institutions in their lives, but it was also nurtured by the staff and teachers who engaged in the everyday acts of (often underpaid and undervalued) care, from listening to them to giving improvised haircuts. It is this foundation that allowed me to build trust. This sometimes meant just being with each other, being bored, playing games together, and running workshops. The young people endured pesky questions that covered both their online and offline worlds, allowing curious insights into their digital practices when they saw fit. As a researcher, I became embedded in broader social choreographies of relationality and privacy that included our smartphones. These choreographies also became a source of insight, as will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3. The smartphone, too, became a research tool as I briefly typed notes and quotes in between conversations, which I then converted into detailed, anonymized field notes and analyzed according to constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2014). Most of the quotes were reconstructed from memory, although some came from recorded interviews. While recent anthropological research increasingly calls for rethinking the typically automatic tendency to anonymize interlocutors’ names (Vorhölter 2021), the high number of minors participating compelled me to consistently replace their names with other similar but common names and change specific details.

The research focused on young people aged fourteen to twenty-one, most of whom were on the cusp between training, apprenticeships, and entering the labor market. The individuals and groups who participated in the study did not belong to a particular “community” such as online gamers or advocates of the quantified self, measuring their steps or calories. Nor did they belong to the visible world of influencers, as my interlocutors had little in common with this very public and exposed field, even if they were sometimes its spectators. Instead, they were ordinary young people experiencing the various difficulties and joys of growing up. This book is therefore a bricolage that attempts to illuminate how time is “spent” in a variety of contexts and at the micro level, rather than speculating on what the ideal of “time well spent” might look like—within and beyond the digital.

Importantly, however, some of my interlocutors would be positioned on the losing side of a digital divide, with “deficient” digital skills and seemingly limited digital literacy—a framing I critique in this book (chapter 2). What was common to a majority (although not all) of my interlocutors because of the choice of research sites was the social and economic conditions that considerably affected their lives, future imagination, and inevitably their digital experience: from chronic waiting and boredom to precarity and migration. Most of the research was conducted with young people from migrant backgrounds, from low-income families and with young people with lower formal education, but also with those who, for various reasons, including mental health, experienced problems in the transition phase between school and work or apprenticeship. Two youth centers, for instance (which formed my most important field sites), were selected as playful recreational sites that could provide a safe space for interaction with mostly underage youths, many of whom were regular visitors. Once in the field, however, the themes of unemployment, waiting, and difficulties with social mobility began to dominate conversations, inspiring analytical categories that inevitably became an essential layer of the narrative presented here. Youth centers are city-funded leisure spaces open to all children and young people under the age of nineteen, and I visited them weekly in 2018 and 2019. Most of the visitors had migration experiences in their biographies, either their own or those of their parents, who had immigrated from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Syria, and others. Austria has a long and dynamic history of immigration—partly due to ties dating back to the Habsburg Empire that encompassed several countries from the region (sometimes more, sometimes less voluntarily).

Once an imperial monarchy, Austria became a republic after World War I and a sovereign state after the Nazi dictatorship. Since the 1960s, labor migration increased as mostly unskilled “guest workers” from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia were actively recruited by Austria to fill positions in the construction, textile, paper, and tourism sectors. Their presence played a crucial role in shaping both the economic success and social life of the country, leaving a particularly strong imprint on Vienna, where migrants have significantly influenced the city’s urban and social landscape (Palmberger 2019). Vienna began to transform into a multilingual city connected to the global flows of migrants, asylum seekers, and students that it is today, with the last major arrival of asylum seekers occurring in 2015 and 2016 (Karasz 2018). The newcomers populated both old working-class neighborhoods that offered cheap subsidized housing and several parks dotted around these areas. The anthropologist Danila Mayer argues in her ethnography of Vienna’s “park youth” that the parks, referred to as Beserlparks in German, were a focal point for newcomers in search of public spaces they could claim as their own (2011: 78). My findings echo Mayer’s insights, but link such politics of space with now-effortless and accessible digital hangouts (see chapter 8).

Perhaps one of the reasons why these stories resonated with me was my own previous experience of migration from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Germany as a teenager. Aspects of my own biography certainly played a role in empathizing with the struggles in the many layers of “foreignness,” exclusion, social mobility, and the related challenges that some of the youths faced. Acknowledging this affective entanglement, however, helps diffuse the opposing dichotomy of the researcher and the interlocutor (Stodulka 2016) and reminds us that the affective dimensions of fieldwork are not a disturbance present within the data, but an intrinsic part of being in and relating to the field (Lubrich and Stodulka 2019; Stodulka, Dinkelaker, and Thajib 2019). Additionally, although all the data were anonymized, I have chosen not to write up the most personal experiences shared with me during fieldwork, out of consideration for the mostly underage youths who were familiar with my role but may not have always understood its extent. After all, with fieldwork intimacy comes ethical responsibility (Stodulka 2021: 93).

It is perhaps also my own experience that makes me adamant to avoid framing young people from disadvantaged contexts in terms of deficits, thus essentializing the differences between “poor” and “rich” children (Ito et al. 2010) while also highlighting precarity and very real inequalities that cannot be glossed over. A similar case can be made in regard to migration. Here I follow scholars (Çağlar 2016; Glick Schiller 2018; Ramsay 2020) who argue that the tendency of anthropologists to construct clear boundaries between migrants and nonmigrants not only “others” migrants, who are then denied a dynamic temporality (Fabian [1983] 2014), but also overlooks the precarity (Tsing 2015) inherent in the neoliberal restructuring of urban life among migrants and nonmigrants alike, in both the so-called Global North and the Global South. Instead of generalizing about migrant, marginalized, or disadvantaged youths,9 the book aims to do justice to the idea that ethnographic research consists of situated “partial truths” (Pool 1991) that are interrupted and supplemented by insights from various settings.

That said, the (digital) experiences of many of my interlocutors were deeply shaped by citizenship regimes and long-standing dynamics of othering and exclusion. For example, extended time online sometimes stemmed from prolonged unemployment, itself a result of limited social mobility or discrimination against certain ethnic or racialized groups within the labor market. Illegal digital activities that arose from the playful passing of time online could also carry greater risks for asylum-seeking youths, for whom minor infractions could result in severe legal or bureaucratic consequences. As a member of the EU, Austria is embedded in a migration system that privileges most EU citizens with freedom of movement, residence, and work, while positioning migrants from outside the EU—often racialized or Orientalized—as outsiders subject to greater precarity. Similar hierarchies are also part of Austria’s history as a former empire, where imperial distinctions between the German-speaking center and the eastern peripheries (including the Balkans at times) cast the latter as lesser Europeans, frequently characterized by stereotypes of backwardness and violence: a view later codified within Aryan Nazi ideology, which deemed Eastern Europeans racially inferior. Such historical legacies also mean that migrants from (South) Eastern Europe, still perceived as not fully European, may sometimes become complicit, willingly or not, in reproducing global racial hierarchies that simultaneously diminish their own status (Krivonos 2023).

Furthermore, Austria’s national identity is profoundly shaped by its historical self-image as the frontier between East and West, a narrative largely rooted in its key defensive role during the Turkish sieges of Vienna in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Throughout Vienna, plaques, monuments, and art in parks, historic buildings, and museums commemorate the city’s resistance against Ottoman expansion into Western and Northern Europe, embedding this memory deeply into the urban landscape and collective consciousness. Adding to this complexity, the majority of immigrants in Austria (excluding Germans) come from former Yugoslavia and Turkey. The long-standing historical entanglements among these groups—shaped by the Ottoman Empire’s centuries-long rule over Balkan territories and the subsequent ethnic and religious conflicts—also infuse contemporary social relations with layers of historical memory and tension. Within this context, simplistic notions of majority and minority fall short. Vienna exemplifies a dynamic urban environment where social housing is interspersed amid affluent neighborhoods, and where young people of migrant backgrounds frequently form significant portions, and sometimes even the majority, in public schools. According to the City of Vienna statistics, 34 percent of the Viennese population did not own Austrian citizenship in 2023 or were born outside of Austria, while half the population had a migration background (“Integration and Diversity Monitor 2023” 2023).10 Such demographic realities further blur the lines of clear-cut social and ethnic divisions, making the city a complex mosaic that challenges conventional separations of belonging and “otherness.”

Although my analytical framing neither foregrounds socioeconomic disadvantage nor migration specifically, it does dive into the matter-of-fact inequalities I encountered. I build on the framing by media anthropologists Sahana Udupa and Max Kramer (2023), who argue that people do not interact with online spaces as abstract technological entities or isolated communication channels; rather, they engage with “multiple interfaces” where migration, the nation-state, citizenship, and other structures of authority intersect and converge. This will become particularly visible when young people enter the labor force carrying the burden of socially segregated public schooling, which is rarely socially porous, while facing and navigating uncertain futures. The borrowed notion of multiple interfaces allows for not dividing groups into migrants, asylum seekers, ethnic groups, or social classes. Instead, it examines dynamic socioeconomic conditions and historical dynamics that affect how, where, and when young people dwell online—and how these practices are interpreted by a wider society.

The anthropological view of digital media technologies, as with technology in general (Chevron 2011), has long been dominated by the notion that technologies are a product of social and cultural activities and that media exist through situated practices (Ramella et al. 2017: 7). As Pink and Horst et al. point out in “Digital Ethnography”, such an approach is based on the premise that the digital should be understood as “part of something wider” (2016: 11), rather than “something out there” (Ardèvol and Lanzeni 2016: 448) to be studied as an isolated cultural phenomenon. The smartphone is also a place to be: “Ich bin am Handy” is German for “I am on the phone.” Digital media technologies are not only a means of communication but also a dwelling in which one can develop a “sense of habitation” (Møller and Robards 2019) and an intimate “co-presence” (Hjorth and Richardson 2014). This “environment” includes bodies intertwined with screens, audiovisual stimuli, vibrations, tactile, and often playful experiences of being in the world. Through this lens, text and content, which are usually at “the heart of media analysis” (Peterson 2005: 22), move into the background. But they are no more or less present than other “content” that young people are confronted with beyond the digital. Online and offline spaces have thus been seen as overlapping spaces of sociality and not as separate, artificially delineated fields of inquiry. Nor have online and offline spaces been conflated, as the deliberate blurring of such boundaries is particularly important from a design perspective and deserves to be closely examined (Bareither 2017; Boellstorff 2020; Nardi 2015).

Therefore, terms such as online or digital and offline or nondigital are used in this book in their literal, descriptive sense, with online and offline being seen as co-constitutive realms of reality. While the research began offline—through classic participant observation—“the digital” was an inherent and overlapping layer of all interactions, interwoven with everyday life and the emerging relationships in the field. This framing aligns with what scholars have called postdigital reality (G. Coleman and Jandrić 2019) in which such a distinction would miss the point not only analytically but also empirically speaking, as I will argue throughout the book. Because of ethical considerations and the access granted through institutions, and mainly because of my interlocutors’ young age,11 I did not shadow them or follow them online by invisibly observing their online practices. The youth centers and schools were regulated spaces where a continual visible and verbally negotiated researcher presence could be established, with consent ensured dynamically as part of an ongoing process.

Although various digital media technologies play a role in this book, I have paid particular attention to smartphones and apps, especially the most popular (at the time of research) social media platforms among young people in Austria, such as Instagram and Snapchat. These spaces were generally navigated by scrolling—a central theme in this book, but one that transcends platforms and applications. The fleeting, rapid up-and-down movements of the thumb are common to many overlapping online spaces of the smartphone, as you navigate effortlessly between apps and content. But scrolling inevitably shares the limelight with swiping, sending messages or pictures, or playing games. There’s a reason for not isolating one platform, practice, or device: The changing landscape of games and casual play now includes not only games in the narrow sense but also a diverse range of playful and creative activities that transcend devices and genres within “app-based ecologies” (2014: 26) or what Urte Undine Frömming et al. (2017) might call “digital environments.” The authors define this as “the conglomeration of technologies, events and realities that interpenetrate each other, sometimes co-constitute each other” (2017: 13). Instead, practices such as scrolling or gaming are part of broader digital mechanisms or best practices in digital design that apply across platforms. These terms refer to common industry practices and include the basic functions and appearance of apps and devices on the one hand, and concepts and models that motivate designers’ decisions on the other.

In addition to ethnographic fieldwork, the foundations of this book are also rooted in participatory and interdisciplinary research in two projects with the aim of codesigning a serious game (Göbl et al. 2021) and an app (Jovičić et al. 2025). Whereas ethnographic research allows for in-depth insights into the more-than-digital big picture, participatory design workshops allow for a more creative, haptic exchange with research participants, through codesign sessions, film creation, drawings, prototypes, excursions, or group discussions—and provocative interventions when discussions stalled (Jovičić, Göbl, and Hristova 2021). Moreover, being part of the design process and looking behind the scenes of design made me aware of the ambiguities inherent in the design process, as well as in relation to the black-and-white narratives that are often reproduced in the public imaginaries of predatory online spaces. Although this work is not about screens, understanding the relevant design trends, ideas, and practices behind these screens—such as mechanics, apps, and games—is crucial so as not to exclude an essential part of the picture.

These field sites and foci will be developed throughout the book as it weaves together the three interlinked strands. The first part begins by outlining the specific social and political conditions in which digital practices are embedded. This includes zooming out from everyday mundane practices like scrolling to reveal the broader picture, including schooling, employment, and concerns about the future. I start by examining the social context of digital practices with a particular focus on (digital) inequalities and topics related to the digital divide (chapter 2), followed by a look into the subtle social choreographies that unfold in daily interactions with friends, family, and the wider world while also exploring dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, or gender (chapter 3). Chapter 4 focuses specifically on the experiences of waiting and boredom, illustrating how precarity intertwines with digital practices. The second strand centers on digital design and how youths negotiate it, highlighting its porous and effortless qualities (chapter 5) as well as its playful aspects (chapter 6). Finally, the third part explores the space and time regimes that shape young people’s lives. Chapter 7 focuses on time by critically examining the question of wasted time and societal notions of productivity, whereas chapter 8 culminates in a theorization of space that considers how young people’s rootedness in physical environments affects (the perception of) their online dwelling. Chapter 9 draws these three strands together, offering concluding remarks on how discourses linked to digital practices and digital personhood are entangled with digital design and physical environments.

Notes

1. 1. Here I follow Jenna Burrell (2012: 29), who in her ethnography with youths in Ghana asked: “if the internet was the answer, what was the question?” based on a similar question posed by Maria Bakardjieva and Richard Smith (2001).
2. 2. Beate Lang, “Comics und die Bibliothek: Zum Beginn einer späten Freundschaft? Das Comic als Forschungsgegenstand und seine Stellung innerhalb des wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheksbetriebs” (MA diss., Universität Wien in Kooperation mit der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, 2013), 89–90.
3. 3. A social media platform based on short-form video content.
4. 4. In fact, my own follow-up research looks at smartphone and internet addiction.
5. 5. All names of interlocutors mentioned in this book have been changed to protect their privacy. The quotes were originally in German, and I have translated them.
6. 6. A social media and social networking service.
7. 7. Drawing on models in motivational psychology, the term “nudging” was defined in 1975 as a way to influence human behavior without involving external or negative consequences and instead relying on voluntary decisions. The concept has been used in game design and apps to improve usability and predictability and to gently persuade the player or user to follow the designers’ intended instructions.
8. 8. A social media platform focused on sharing photos and short-form videos.
9. 9. Given a lack of suitable alternatives, the terms “marginalized” or “disadvantaged” are occasionally used to signal systemic mechanisms of socioeconomic, discriminatory, and cultural exclusion. The term in no way implies that the subjective experience of my research partners included the same marginal experiences or fixed attributes, nor that these young people were on the periphery of society at large. Rather, the term attempts to highlight social inequalities and specific challenges that are not always relevant to the urban, cosmopolitan elites who tend to shape the narratives of digitalization.
10. 10. The term “migration background” is a concept commonly used in German-speaking countries to describe individuals who either have immigrated themselves or have at least one parent who immigrated. It captures the idea of a migratory family history, often regardless of whether the person was born in the country or not.
11. 11. When introducing myself to new youth center visitors, and to students and young participants in the employment lab, I explained my role as a researcher, sometimes comparing my job to that of a journalist conducting interviews, as researcher was rarely a familiar category. I always ensured verbal (and in the case of recorded interviews, written) consent. None of the activities were carried out without making my role and research activities transparent.