This is not the place to delve into the extensive academic debate about the efects of new media on the nature of consumer culture. It is, however, worth pausing to consider just how much personal digital devices and systems facilitate and foster user involvement.44 Throughout the book I have treated the Internet as a sociomaterial practice that is open to manifold usages, although, as I have emphasized, its network architecture is shaped by powerful commercial interests to steer users down particular pathways. Here I have been focusing on the ways in which ICTs reconfigure the temporal and spatial basis of intimate relationships. But developments such as Web 2.0, open-source software, and Wikipedia show how the unique materialities of ICTs are also generating unprecedented and unpredictable cultural and informational practices. Indeed, the web is itself animated by users who are both producers and consumers. In this sense, the Internet is quintessentially a “generative” technology in a way that no previous technology has been.
So argues Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet. He sets out to compare the generative qualities of previous tools, such as hammers, Lego bricks, knives, and dumbbells with the Internet and traditional PC architecture. While the former are versatile and can be combined in a variety of ways, truly generative systems contain the capacity “to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.”45 Compared to traditional technologies, PCs and network technologies produce both technical innovation and participatory output, albeit some of it unwelcome (such as malware).46
Crucially for the time-pressure paradox, generativity gives rise to new channels for social networking and creative expression, new forms of work and a host of new preoccupations and activities. Such changes are happening at a startling rate. For example, a multibillion-dollar apps industry has arisen virtually overnight. The iPhone and iPad already have about seven hundred thousand apps, from Instagram to Angry Birds, and the number of software engineers, including freelance app writers, has mushroomed to over a million.47 Rather than being confined to massive R&D labs, the process of developing and making hardware and software is much more distributed.
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