Comfort/Discomfort Zones: Media and Everyday Affects

Comfort and discomfort constantly intertwine in the media experience. For example, an overarching dissatisfaction can be highlighted in viewers’ reactions and academic discourses alike, pointing out anxiety and frustration in the continually renewed hope of finding pleasure in entertainment. Consider the “ennui of the scroll” (Benson-Allott 2021), where an overwhelming amount of content and increasing access costs generate fatigue and anxiety. A reaction to that is the well-documented nostalgia for linear television or familiar genres (Niemeyer 2021; Becker and Trigg 2025), or a turn toward feel-good shows and casual viewing (Tavlin 2024). Such uses represent a form of relief, a way to temporarily suspend the demands of the world (Horn 2010). They are also a response to digital fatigue and the logic of the attention economy (Crary 2013).

In fact, research highlights a fundamental protective function of the media (Casetti 2023). Cinema, television, and digital media have historically helped to manage—or filter—our relationship to the world, offering refuge, compensation, and reparation from the business of ordinary life. This orientation toward reassuring and relaxing experiences is relevant in the context of contemporary crisis which has intensified since the pandemic and with rising national and international conflicts.

Such a perspective allows us to better understand the phenomenon in which, while unpleasant or disappointing, depressing TV shows or those depicting ordinary affects become the object of assiduous, passionate, and soothing practices like “sad porn” (Beaver 2019) or “norm porn” (Tongson 2023). In these cases, uncertainty (Boni 2023), or what would usually be considered as discomfort converts into a form of reparation or even pleasure. It is actively sought as a reparative practice suited to the “affective flexibility required by neoliberal culture” (Hargraves 2023, 8).

Scholars have analyzed strategies for avoiding—or differently managing—various situations of discomfort, irritation, and failure associated with media experiences. Boredom, for example, applies to a broad range of experiences, between passivity and activity (Bogost 2016; Paasonen 2021; 2024; Kendall 2025; Zawadka 2022). An ordinary boredom, or “vulgar boredom,” as opposed to boredom conceived as culturally or intellectually elevating, might be a way of coping with the feeling that we are living in a constant state of crisis (Richmond 2015).

Within this framework, frictions and failure can also be a space to rethink our current position, orientation, and idea of progress—not necessarily in a romantic, optimistic way but underlining the limits of our condition (Halberstam 2011; Appadurai and Alexander 2019, Alexander 2025). The emphasis on the search of comfort can stifle engagement and reinforce inequalities. Besides, critical studies of convenience (Neves and Steinberg 2023) have underlined the multiple problems on an ecological, political, economic and societal scale of the accessibility to entertainment and other commodities in our capitalist, post-industrial world. Therefore, comfort and discomfort define zones of privilege and marginality, and require post-colonial, feminist and queer theoretical perspectives which note that marginalized individuals are habitually excluded from these defensive mechanisms and cast as threats (Edelman 2005; Ahmed 2006).

Is this a form of “cruel optimism,” (Berlant 2011) a situation in which we are doing what will ultimately harm us? Is the search for a safe space helpful in a time of crisis, or does it accentuate the lack of engagement and the rise of inequalities? What would it mean to embrace discomfort or explore failure to its fullest extent? What do comfort and discomfort reveal about the role of media today?

The conference will investigate the dynamics between comfort and discomfort in the media experience. Our aim is to gain a better understanding of the affective dimensions of media experience in an era of uncertainty, characterized by abundance of content and exhaustion, compromise, within a horizon of global crisis and constant threat—on a political, economic, social, ecological, sanitary, and cultural level.