DIGITAL DISCONNECTION, THE BROKEN PROMISE OF ATTENTION, AND POTENTIAL FOR CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT: A CASE STUDY OF THE FOREST

Abstract

At a time when the accessibility of digital media technology at any time enables individuals constantly and permanently exist in the digital connection, the public become more concerned with relationship between digital media, digital attention crisis and technology addiction. This research contributes to the analysis of an emerging branch of mobile app industry that claims to address this issue. Based on the walk-through method and semi-structured interviews with users of one of the most popular app in this industry, the Forest app, this study develops a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of the "technicity of attention" (Bucher, 2012) that underpins the app and how it mediates users' conceptualization of their experiences and routines of this app. Despite the app’s broken promise of attention, the study observes that users' experience of failure and frustration helps to reveal the app's same logic of attention arrangement shared by attention economy, and creates the conditions for users to reflect on the connectivity paradox and the problematic oppositional relational structure between dependency and agency.