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

Abstract

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