ABSTRACT
This chapter takes inspiration from Roland Barthes’ concept of transported immobility to understand the contrary experience of living in a digital media blackout zone. By using Barthes’ protocol of attention to contingency in everyday life, I explore the Wi-Fi tethering experience in the Swedish forest, where I am tethered to a particular indoor and outdoor place and dependent on intermittent digital media connection. Such tethering fixes me to a place in the rural forest that enables Wi-Fi, provides access and a flow of communication in that moment of connection, and is a source of frustration as rural infrastructures and inclement weather routinely affect the experience. The chapter reflects on a double meaning of tethering: in the context of media there is the action of staying fixed in one place so your telecommunications devices can enable data movement, a fixity and flow in the media environment; and in the context of mobility, there is the tethering of a human, non-human, or object where there is the action of restricting or disabling movement, a regulation and constraint in everyday life. This tethering experience brings into relief assumptions we make about normative digital media experiences. These other stories of the media and its social and technical affordances compels us to review assumptions about digital society - this is a particular rural experience at the margins of socio-technical visions and dominant media theories. Such an experience signals the mirage of a digital society for particular rural citizens in a topography where media breakdown is a routine feature of daily life.
