Entertained or Else

While the 'problem' of boredom and what to do about it is hardly new, in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, this concern came to dominate as a major preoccupation of lockdown life. Looking back at the longer history of boredom from this post-pandemic vantage point, Entertained or Else considers how networked media have established a historically specific relationship with boredom through their ability to place lived experience outside of the phenomenological grasp of subjects. Focusing on the specific gestures, habits, and embodied practices that converge around boredom in a digital network culture, this book considers how this ambivalent mood has been instrumentalised as an important site of discipline and power. It identifies the range of cultural techniques that have been developed for codifying, classifying, sensing and pre-empting boredom, with the aim of driving bored subjects back to entertainment networks. Although the book focuses on 21st-century media, it engages with the historical literature on boredom to interrogate the promise that boredom can be chased away by digital entertainment. By bringing the rich critical and cultural histories of boredom and entertainment into dialogue with recent theories of attention, affect, and temporality, Entertained or Else advances a new understanding of boredom that is specific to modern entertainment networks.