Conference Program

Contemporary digital user experience is characterized by acute techno-social opacity. Algorithms determine and exert significant influence over user choices. Media Education Literacy, in its various constructs, focuses on the multiple risks this entails, as well as aiming to counteract power and its ideologies mediated by narrative, messages, and images, and thus its ideologies. However, insights into complexity through the lens of Morin and Foucault's power-knowledge theory are often overlooked, with the risk of investigating and overlooking certain phenomenological issues of user experience. Through Morin's lens, along with Foucault's, and in conjunction with multiple readings of algorithmic governmentality, including Rouvroy's, it is possible to understand how the power of platforms and stacks, as a meta-device no longer of bodies but of the mind, reaches the user well before conveying their messages, situating itself in the systemic opacity of the interface, inducing errors or gestural repetitions, or so-called digital sludges. Specifically, the aim is to trace and reconstruct the connections and processes that systemically link dark patterns, gamification and nudging, fluidity-error and complexity, distraction, grinding and excessive use as the purposes of digital power-knowledge and surveillance capitalism. Finally, it elaborates these visions in light of Slow Media education, a pedagogy of care as a fundamental basis in contemporary educational contexts.