Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures

by Catherine Coveney, Michael Greaney, Eric L. Hsu

This book draws on a variety of substantive examples from science, technology, medicine, literature, and popular culture to highlight how a new technoscientifically mediated and modified phase and form of technosleep is now in the making – in the global north at least; and to discuss the consequences for our relationships to sleep, the values we accord sleep and the very nature and normativities of sleep itself.The authors discuss how technosleep, at its simplest denotes the ‘coming together’ or ‘entanglements’ of sleep and technology and sensitizes us to various shifts in sleep–technology relations through culture, time and place. In doing so, it pays close attention to the salience and significance of these trends and transformations to date in everyday/night life, their implications for sleep inequalities and the related issues of sleep and social justice they suggest.

224 pages, Paperback

Published June 27, 2023

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild and bland. An academic foray into the ways in which sleep has been technologized. This doesn't just mean "machines added" but rather technology in a broader sense: applying knowledge to achieve some goal with a thing. The authors traverse a range of scientific and popular material to poke and prode the notion of sleep in contemporary history. A good chunk of the text was nostalgic for me. They even reference Turkle's notion of computers as marginal objects: liminal entities that sometimes have a mind of their own and defeat their maker's preconceptions. I gobbled up the deep takes on Huxley's sleep-learning from Brave New World ("a state of acute cognitive and political vulnerability") and hypnosis as a form of sleep in Get Out, along the same vein. The notion of how sleep could be colonized or perhaps is being colonized already resonates (and with no small amount of fear). I hadn't heard of "crip time," that there's "normative understandings of bodily rhythms" (not just the bodies as physical matter in the world) around which society disables people. At the same time, this is very much an academic text and difficult to parse (or enjoy reading) at times. I also felt that everything was treated rather superficially. Any given chapter could be expanded into a larger text. A little dose for future dreaming.

Thank you to Edelweiss+ and Palgrave Macmillan for the advance copy.