La déconnexion volontaire aux technologies de l’information et de la communication – DEVOTIC

Our goal is to account for practices of disruption, of resistance, of tension or of filtering in relation to the perverse effects of permanent connection, to the pressure of « real time» and to the potential security slips produced by the ICTs, both in certain professional categories and in the everyday life of the majority of people. The development of the ICTs has been accompanied, during these last twenty years, by an opinion about them which is, in general terms, very positive. Outside the economic and professional areas, where they have become the essential tools for the shortening of delays, for the speeding up of rhythms and for the generalization of simultaneity in a generalized chrono-competitiveness environment, ICTs have obtained a huge success among the general public. In fact, they allow to fulfill (of course, only to a certain extent) a desire which is as old as humanity, that of ubiquity, and a fantasy which is as old as the individual, that of the permanent contact with the beloved ones. Ubiquity, immediacy and permanence beyond the reality principle of this world that separates, draws apart and isolates: the ICTs have been the almost magical tools for that generation which has discovered them. The new world of generalized interconnection only makes sense, if the interlocutors, at each extreme of the line and of the waves, reply: hence the command to remain ever more connected. This connection is synonymous with immediacy, with safety, with opening up and with escapism, but also with undesired information, with inopportune calls, with an excessive workload, with a confusion between urgency and importance, with new addictions and with non authorized controls; the security of some is obtained at the cost of the surveillance of others. It is due to those unwanted effects that new kinds of behaviour have arisen in the recent past. They aim at preventing us from being deprived of our own temporality, of our own rhythms so as to gain the laying out of a universal synchrony which would be able to gather in real time all those connected to the « great network », in a kind of all encompassing compulsion. They reintroduce the thickness of the time of maturation, of reflection and of meditation precisely there where the shock of the immediate and of the urgent forces us to react too often impulsively. In the most extreme cases, they can lead towards a complete disconnection, often in the aftermath of an occupational « overheating », and of a burnout. But most of the time they consist in installing safety valves between the networks of telecommunication and the individual. The pursued ideal is to attain a maximum control of the flow of telecommunication that passes through a person, i.e., the power to keep one's contacts and a sufficient opening without thereby becoming their slave. That ideal of mastery is specially observable in the original techniques of filtering: authentic treasures of the human imagination can be deployed in order to escape from the « dictatorship of immediacy », from the inflation of information, from the restrictions of the networks, or from the wish of omnipresence of their correspondents. Thus the research deals with the behaviours of refusal not of the technologies themselves, but of certain uses of them, particularly of those which lead to excesses, to the uninterrupted connection and to the addiction and of those technologies aimed at an undesired surveillance and at a control at a distance. By multiplying the observational fields, the research will strive, at the beginning, to take inventory of those behaviours and to evaluate them in order to, at a second stage, withdraw from them, beyond their differences, the lines of force and their logical functioning. To sum up, its goal is to produce an active knowledge of the behaviours that aim at controlling the flow of communication in a society which drives towards the permanent connection.