Drowsing: toward a concept of sleepy screen engagement Dan Hassoun and James N. Gilmore Department of Communication & Culture, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA ABSTRACT Sleep frequently intersects with media technologies in routinized yet unpredictable ways. This article proposes a concept of “drowsing” to describe how sleepiness occurs and persists across aspects of banal media life. Focusing on nighttime tablet use and blue light engagement, we argue that sleep requires a multidimensional and embodied account of how cultural practices, biological rhythms, and incidental occurrences interact. Ultimately, focusing on sleep suggests the contradictory roles that technologies play within the duration of everyday life—both providing a sense of calmness and deceleration, even as they accelerate life or contribute to long-term bodily harm. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 26 June 2016 Accepted 20 October 2016 KEYWORDS Everyday life; media; sleep; Gilles Deleuze; sensation Sleep is often imagined as something habitual and routine. After all, it involves many rela- tively repetitive practices (lying down and waking up along certain time schedules, com- porting one’s body in particular ways upon the mattress, turning off lights, donning pajamas, brushing or flossing one’s teeth, etc.). These repetitions can undoubtedly provide a sense of security and stability. However, as Matthew Wolf-Meyer has argued, even when these (seeming) constancies are in place, “minute differences set every sleep event apart from others.” 1 It would be more precise to say that sleeping is a domain of attempted routines. Its habits are individually, if not socially, constructed, but sleepiness is a sensation that rarely abides fully by the desire to organize and routinize the everyday. Imagine, for a moment, that you are Narcissa—a graduate student in her late twenties at a competitive research university. Narcissa’s days include time spent on coursework, teaching, and a number of other professional and personal obligations. On this particular afternoon, Narcissa has arranged her schedule so that she can attend a lecture by an influ- ential scholar whose research is related to hers. Narcissa arrives early; she finds a great seat in the lecture hall; she eagerly takes out her laptop for note-taking. However, not 10 minutes into the lecture, Narcissa begins to feel her eyelids getting heavy; she finds her focus drifting across multiple tabs on her computer’s browser. Suddenly, her attention no longer feels sustained. She is gliding. She is elsewhere. At the same time, she is aware of her environment, and at moments may snap back awake to catch intervals of the lecture. She is fighting off (or begrudgingly accepting) sleep. This imagined story of Narcissa is an all-too familiar one for millions of people who routinely feel underrested throughout their days, perhaps due to overwork or undersleep, © 2017 National Communication Association CONTACT Dan Hassoun dhassoun@indiana.edu COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES, 2017 VOL. 14, NO. 2, 103–119 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2016.1276611