More broadly, the Internet makes it possible to reshape “both the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ of cultural production. . . . It adds to the centralized, market-oriented production system a new framework of radically decentralized individual and cooperative nonmarket production.”48 Individuals and groups can actively participate in the process of cultural creation. This is not to suggest that the Internet guarantees an “interactive society,” as some would have it, nor to imply that broadcast media are incapable of interactivity.49 But there is little doubt that digital media open up new opportunities for the democratization of cultural production, providing important sites of self-expression in the twenty-first century. The fact that human-machine interactions characterize so much of our leisure time needs to be understood as adding a dimension to temporal experience. It certainly confounds the dynamics of when we are at work or play. The speed or instantaneity of contemporary consumer cultural is a further issue, which I will take up in my final chapter.
Conclusion
From the telegraph to the landline telephone, communication technologies have long shaped social interaction. However, since the advent of the mobile phone and the Internet, interpersonal relationships are routinely conducted via machines in times and places once regarded as the public domain. The customary split between the public and private is now overlaid with and complicated by another layer of electronic network connections. Sharing our most intimate lives in multiple sites beyond the physical space of the house challenges our very conception of the home. Activities that once defined the separate times devoted to family, work, and leisure are being combined in new constellations. It is my argument that digital devices open up fresh possibilities for what we can do with our time that goes beyond the fixed distinctions between work and family.
Chapter six
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