Suchergebnisse

"The weight of constant digital connection is the default condition of working life, home life, and everyday personal life - driving us to engage more with platforms than with people, a new state of constant disconnection that we cannot escape. Overflowing email inboxes, deluges of mobile phone notifications and torrents of social media posts--the flow of communication in its abundance is today's individualized interface for interpersonal and professional practices. Communication technologies and their use are both the needle and the thread of the wider social tapestry of everyday contemporary life. This ever-changing communication environment is where the neoliberal economic policies of the West and the commercial imperatives of the platform and data-mining industries meet. It is where the contradictions they produce can be felt day-to-day by citizens-turned-users. How does it feel to live at the pressure points of intersecting economic realities and why does it matter? Drawing on extensive sociological research, Burchell examines how individuals try to manage connection as participation in everyday life and how, on a larger scale, the ever-expanding knowledge, communication, and data-driven economies depend on the very pressures that result from our disparate communication needs. With so much time spent managing the pressures of our communication environment, we often overlook the way media technologies produce systemic tensions that are reshaping how we interact with each other and what we understand to be social connection today"--

In the contemporary urban environment, the conditions for communication are in abundance, having shifted and extended to include multiple overlapping possibilities for interaction through mobile devices, personal computers, and online platforms such that traditional domains of activity have been subsumed within a relational domain of communication activity. This involves not only an extension of interaction across spaces of activity but also the remapping of how interpersonal communication practices are woven into the temporality and embodied practices of everyday life. The conditions for networked communication partially emerge through a consistent set of embodied background communication practices. These include practices of the individual maintaining contact with technological objects in their environment and also the habitual rhythms of interface-level practices, which together contribute to the forms of networked connection.Stemming from qualitative fieldwork with 35 participants during 2010 and 2011, this paper explores the organization and experience of networked interpersonal communication practices within the temporalities of everyday life. The individual's perceived need for networked connection is proposed as the prerequisite for, but also a condition of, participation in contemporary everyday life. This paper explores the emerging role of networked time: where the constant and multiple embodied rhythms of individual engagement with overlapping media technologies, as objects and interfaces within the material environment, are interwoven with the capacity of those media to partially constitute one's relationship to, and management of, time in everyday life. The tension between the finite minutes of the individual's day and the limitless potential of networked connection is explored through the individual's interface-level practices to avoid being temporally overwhelmed by potential interactions. In this manner, communication is perceived and managed as distinct, quantifiable, but variable units of time in and of themselves: interaction as "tasks" to be addressed and completed through engagement.