iTime: Labor and life in a smartphone era

Abstract

The smartphone changes everything, or so it seems. iPhones create iTime and fundamentally alter the boundaries between public and private and day and night. We are now online anytime/anywhere, requiring new theoretical understandings of time and place. This starts with the young, who are inseparable from their phones, and has now spread to their parents. Smartphones use us, bending us to their compulsive rhythms and demanding our attention. In a good society, we would be the masters of technology, retaining the connectivity and global reach of our smartphones, but not enslaved to them as many of us are today. As the example of the smartphone demonstrates, the internet requires new social and cultural theory in order to address its transforming potential.