Tasking the everyday: Where mobile and online communication take time

Abstract

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.