Entertained or Else

Tina Kendall’s Entertained or Else makes a groundbreaking intervention into boredom studies by showing how social media and digital cultures of boredom generate their own creative potential. In an age where productivity is so highly valued, Kendall demonstrates boredom’s capacity to feel otherwise, but also its ambivalence in being drawn back into wider regimes of power. The book takes us through the full range of affective, bodily, gestural, discursive and atmospheric ways that boredom moves us (or doesn’t), while recognizing the wider political structures and intersectional inequalities that make such a project so vital in our times. It will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in digital media, cultural studies and researchers and students of emotion, feeling and affect. * Adrienne Evans, Professor in Gender and Culture, Coventry University, UK, and author of Digital Feeling (with Sarah Riley 2023) * With the invention of the Internet, we managed to invent not only unheard of new forms of stimulation, but also unprecedented levels of boredom, nestled within these same digital networks. In this never-dull new book, Tina Kendall is our beguiling tour guide of these new Dante-like levels of tedium, demonstrating how this most feared of feelings might also be an opportunity to break the compulsive search for our next quick dopamine fix. * Dominic Pettman, University Professor of Media and New Humanities, The New School, USA, and author of Seeking Attention (2025) and Infinite Distraction (2016) * This book offers a smart, insightful and engaging analysis of boredom as both an underpinning structure of feeling and a perpetual problem that digital platforms promise to solve. Resisting totalizing analyses of networked culture, Kendall opens up much needed novel ways of understanding the imperatives of entertainment and the complex dynamics that boredom is made of. * Susanna Paasonen, Professor of Media Studies, University of Turku, Finland *