Digital Exhaustion: An Introduction

Overflowing email inboxes. Back-to-back Zoom meetings. Unending data extraction. Constant connectivity. The pressure to maintain social media presence. Netflix bingeing. Daily life in digital culture can be exhausting. This timely and urgent edited collection takes the theme of ‘digital exhaustion’ as a starting point for critical inquiry into the ever-expanding presence of digital technologies in daily life. We offer 'exhaustion’ as a broad and versatile conceptual prism for thinking through human-technology relations in the current climate of digital overload. Digital exhaustion - along with a range of other related affects and experiences, including digital burnout, Zoom fatigue, information overload, and social media overuse - have all emerged as key structures of feeling in the present. As digital technologies become increasingly entrenched in our personal and professional lives, the need to engage in sustained dialogue about digital futures and the ways that these technologies are being deployed, embraced, and opposed is of pressing importance. This edited collection is responsive to this need.