Interface Frictions

Neta Alexander is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Yale University and coauthor of Failure.

• Introduction. Disabled/Enabled 11. Repetition, Reloaded: On Refreshing, Latency, and Frictional Aesthetics 252. The Right to Speed Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered Its Blind Users) 553. Automating Trauma: On Autoplay and the Unbingeable 854. “Log In, Chill Out”: On “Horizontal Media,” Night Modes, and Sleep Apps 118Coda. On Digital Disability and the Normalization of Fatigue 150Acknowledgments 165Notes 169Bibliography 197Index

“Honing its attention on design features, rather than the sprawling scale of platforms or software, this brilliant book points the way to a new media studies. Neta Alexander offers critical theories of refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and Night Shift, foregrounding the ways these seemingly transparent media functions configure and debilitate their users. The book does not end with this diagnosis - rather, Alexander delves into the ‘interface frictions’ experienced (and sometimes encouraged) by disabled and other edge users, finding at this juncture further sources of critique and ‘alternate imaginings of digitality.’” - Mara Mills, Director, New York University Center for Disability Studies “Our bodies are breaking from the strain of being always online. But our debility, Interface Frictions shows, is no accident; it is the intentional result of design decisions to extract profit from us. Neta Alexander’s book is both a passionate manifesto and an incisive history of streaming media retold from the impaired or ‘nonaverage’ user’s perspective. It points us to the ways that access and disability can be reimagined and to the creative strategies by which we might steal back the time to rest and survive.” - Tung-Hui Hu, author of Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection