Like many people during the COVID pandemic, Neta Alexander began spending much of her time online: teaching on Zoom, streaming films, holding video calls with friends. The longer she did, the more she became aware of how she was being affected physically, as well as how these technologies were failing her as a person with disabilities.
A congenital facial paralysis made her prone to eye strain and dryness, and a metal plate in her spine, the result of Ewings sarcoma, heightened her back pain. Long hours at the screen intensified her fatigue, while design features meant to streamline digital engagement often left her more frustrated than supported.
It was during this period that Alexander, an assistant professor of film and media in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, found the inspiration for her new book, “Interface Frictions: How Digital Debility Reshapes our Bodies” (Duke University Press). Alexander defines her theory of digital debility as “the slow and unrecognized ways in which digital technologies inflict harm on human bodies.”
The book is focused on the impacts of four common digital interface design features: the refresh function that loads new content, the playback speed/speed watching function on streaming platforms, the preview autoplay function on streaming service homepages, and auto-dimming night modes for screens. Alexander examines how these functions help fuel digital addiction, binge-watching, physical pain, and fatigue — and how they often fail or even cause harm to those she calls “non-average users,” who have different types of viewing, listening, or muscular needs.
“Taken together, the features I study habituate users to ignore their biological and emotional needs,” Alexander writes. “Technologies touted as pleasurable, on-demand, democratizing, and empowering effectively promote an ascetic ideology by which the human body is either generalized as male, able, and white — or is ignored altogether.”
Neta Alexander reads an excerpt from “Interface Friction”
Neta Alexander reads an excerpt from “Interface Friction”
Before coming to Yale, Alexander taught at Colgate University and served as an assistant editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Her work focuses on digital culture, film and media, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies.
Alexander sat down with Yale News to talk about how people with disabilities have helped shape some interface design features, the “tyranny of the default feature,” and how we can identify and navigate “access friction.” The conversation has been condensed and edited.
In the book, you talk about the way technological features impact many of us physically, but also about how people with disabilities, who often aren’t considered when such features are developed, have been able to tweak them to better suit their needs. You use the term “crip technoscience.” What does that mean?
Neta Alexander: This is a term I borrow from Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, disability media scholars who wrote the “Crip Technoscience Manifesto” in 2019. Crip technoscience is meant to remind us how people with disabilities tweak and remake technologies for political action, refusing to comply with demands to just use technology to cure or fix or eliminate disability. It acknowledges that many mainstream tools — whether screen readers, captions, or playback speed — were first developed or adapted by disabled users who refused to wait for official fixes. At the same time, it is critical of the harms that science and technology often produce through militarism, colonialism, or surveillance. So it’s both a practice and a politics: it names how disabled communities create friction, alternatives, and innovation that challenge the idea of “frictionless” tech, and open the way for more just, diverse forms of access.
An example of crip technoscience from my book is how blind Netflix subscribers, who are used to listening to audiobooks and audio descriptions at faster speeds, developed or downloaded browser extensions that enabled them to speed up streaming long before the company added this feature.
You also talk about how disability activists have helped shape some media technologies.
Alexander: One of the main goals of the book is to make the argument that we cannot write any kind of media history or media theory without considering the non-average user and, specifically, people with disabilities. It’s just impossible. For example, the only reason we have closed captioning is because of activism by deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans in the 1970s and ‘80s, especially students from Gallaudet, which was the first four-year college for deaf students. That activism really pushed Congress to pass the 1990 Television Decoder Circuitry Act, which required television manufacturers to incorporate closed captioning ability into every television set with screens 13 inches or larger. Now, Gen Z is using captions because they like to watch media on mute while commuting or exercising. Language learners like me — English is not my first language — use subtitles and captions to improve our language skills.
Another example is playback speed. In the 1950s and ‘60s, blind students decided that the audiobooks that were supposedly recorded specifically for their needs were in fact very slow for them. If they were expected to integrate into public schools, there was just no way they could complete their homework if they had to listen to, say, one book chapter for two or three hours. So, they hacked record players to make them play faster. And they put pressure on companies to introduce a record player that would allow them to alter the speed.
How did you discover this history?
Alexander: My work is informed by the work of many incredible disability media scholars. For example, Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne have been doing ethnographic work and interviewing blind people who were students in the 1960s to ask them about how they hacked the phonograph. This is how I initially learned about that.
I also conducted interviews with software engineers and accessibility consultants, including Robert Sweeney, the Netflix engineer who helped design the autoplay feature. Creating an original digital archive, I excavated design histories based on tech blogs, press releases, users’ forums, and the Internet Archive.
Other forms of activism have caused companies to revise streaming technologies to consider the needs of non-average users.
Alexander: In the book I call this “the tyranny of the default feature.” This is when companies roll out a new function and make it automatic instead of optional. Netflix’s preview autoplay is a perfect example. Launched in 2016, it bombarded viewers with loud, sometimes graphic trailers the moment they opened the homepage or hovered over a program title. You might just want to unwind with an episode of “Friends,” but instead you are hit with violent crime previews. In 2019, Melissa Bryant started a petition, quickly signed by more than 100,000 people, pointing out how harmful this could be for those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or anxiety disorders. Netflix eventually relented and added an opt-out option.
A better approach is trauma-informed design: make new features optional from the start, and test them with diverse users, not just the white, male, able-bodied demographic Silicon Valley so often defaults to.
Another term you use in relation to new technology is “access friction.” What is that?
Alexander: Interactive design is obsessed with frictionless technology and seamless flow. I am suggesting that communication is never seamless. In the 1980s, for example, the graphic user interface [offering icons or menus for navigation] made computer use more accessible for people with dyslexia or language learners, who previously had to type into the command-line interface. But at the same time, it excluded blind users. The question should be, access for whom?
By “access friction” I also mean the small but consequential tensions that arise when human bodies meet digital interfaces. These frictions — whether refreshing a page hundreds of times, straining through autoplay, or relying on captions — can be disabling for some and enabling for others. They reveal that access is never neutral. Studying design through this lens helps us see beyond promises of seamlessness and efficiency, and instead ask: who benefits, who is excluded, and how might friction be reimagined as a space for care, creativity, or resistance?
A book launch for “Interface Frictions” will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 22 at 5:30 p.m. in Room 134 of the Humanities Quadrangle. The event will feature a roundtable discussion with author Neta Alexander; Elizabeth Ellcessor, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia; Tung-Hui Hu, associate professor of English at the University of Michigan; Mara Mills, associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University; and Dylan Mulvin, associate professor in the department of media and communications at the London School of Economics. The discussion will be moderated by John Durham Peters, the Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies at Yale. All are welcome.
