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# Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

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Regardless of the communication modality, my research in Australia found that women are more likely than men to value keeping in touch with relatives, with almost 90 percent of women saying that the landline is either “important” or “very important,” especially as a useful way of maintaining contact. The same gendered pattern holds for mobile phones and e-mails. This usage pattern also holds true for American women, who use landlines, mobile phones, e-mails and instant messaging more than men do.25 They also contact children more often than men, especially using landlines and mobile phones.

Interestingly, this overall configuration is consistent with the earlier literature on the gendering of the landline telephone. Such studies show that a feminine culture of “kinkeeping,” caring, and mutual support played a much more central part in women’s use of the landline than in men’s. As Lana Rakow reported from her American study of telephoning, women’s talk is a form of caregiving, gendered work that women do to hold together the fabric of the community, building and maintaining relationships.26 This emotional, or care, work is an aspect of intimacy underemphasized in mainstream writing on the family. Whether these gendered patterns are being incorporated into mobile phone usage is still an open question.

What is broadly accepted is that communication has become more central to intimate relationships. Anthony Giddens in particular argues that modern marriages and partnerships are based on a dialectic of mutual self-disclosure, a sharing of inner thoughts and feelings.27

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Whereas traditional marriages were bound by economic and practical conventions, these egalitarian relationships are cemented by talk, relying on participants’ willingness to continue because of their mutual pleasure therein. This profound cultural shift also characterizes parent-child relationships more than it did in the past. If intimacy is more and more characterized by rich communication, then the idea that communication technologies are somehow in opposition to “good” family relationships is contentious to say the least. Indeed, these devices may be providing an additional channel for performing intimacy.

In my view, then, the issue is to what extent physical, face-to-face relationships should be privileged in themselves. Certainly a particular form of copresence, choosing to spend time together to enjoy the pleasure of copresence, is a practice of intimacy in itself. Prioritizing time, ofering privileged access to time, and seeking “quality time” are all ways of expressing afection, often within a spatially and temporally delineated private sphere. Does the fact that relationships with family and friends are increasingly digitally mediated mean that people place less value on being colocated?

Keeping in touch while physically apart is undoubtedly a marker of intimacy. The ability to be communicatively present with mobile devices may even enhance closeness at a distance. In order to gain some insight into this possible use, as part of my research I asked respondents, “If you and your partner are routinely apart for more than a day at a time, how important is the mobile phone in maintaining the quality of your relationship?” Approximately three-quarters of both men and women consider the mobile phone to be either very important or important in maintaining the quality of their relationship while geographically separated. Connecting with significant others, even via short calls or texts (phatic communication), can play a role in sustaining and deepening intimate relationships. Rather than conveying specific information, in many cases the call or text itself may be constitutive of the relationship.

Here and in my other writing on the mobile phone, I have argued that while people may erect a boundary in order to maintain a distance between work and home, they use the same property of mobiles—constant connection—to strengthen ties with kin and close friends at a distance. For example, when I did my study, nearly everyone was switching of their mobile phone in the cinema, two-thirds were switching them of at work meetings, and almost half turned them of in restaurants. However, only a minority turned their mobile of during leisure activities and during meal times at home. While one would now ask if people were turning their mobile phones to silent rather than switching them of, this pattern seems to indicate that people consider transgressing public spaces as more important than allowing calls at times reserved for family solidarity. Perhaps this is because the telephone is so closely associated with a deepening of connections with significant others that there is less need to control the flow over these temporal boundaries.

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Indeed, people may positively welcome the softening of the separation between home and work aforded by these new devices, because, rather than fearing work intrusion, they are seeking deeper contact with family and friends. While the work-extension thesis emphasizes the dissolution of spatial and temporal boundaries, a focus on connected presence draws our attention to the social practices that constitute and maintain a private realm for afective relationships among family members and friends. This novel development reinforces the relational nature of family practices, deemphasizing domestic colocation and creating families without borders. Afective intimacy and the mobile phone are not in opposition to one another, as commentators of Turkle’s ilk assume. Mobile communication devices should rather be regarded as another node in the flows of afect that create and bind intimacy.

Digital Youth

A major omission in my discussion so far is that I have not disaggregated abstract categories such as “family” and “friend” in order to examine how individuals in widely diverse personal relationships represented by these labels actually use ICTs. Just as in face-to-face talk, mediated communication has many more registers than those contributing to deepening intimacy.28 Both face-to-face talk and mediated communication can be deployed in the exercise of control. Parents’ (sometimes excessive) surveillance of their children is a case in point. It is both a practice of intimacy and a form of control. Structural inequalities between couples and between parents and children suggest that there will be a wide variation in how apparently similar calls and texts are interpreted. A single mobile call can have multiple functions, serving a range of purposes that are extremely dificult to categorize. There is considerable evidence, for example, that teenage children can experience mobile calls from their parents as a form of control and surveillance.

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In relation to family time, studies vary in their findings. In Europe, for example, the work of Sonia Livingstone documents a trend toward privatized solo use of computer technologies among children consistent with living together and spending time part. She notes the advancing disappearance of family televisions and computers with the growth of individually used devices in the personal space of bedrooms.29 Others disagree, suggesting that ICTs “have become the glue that binds some families together” through interaction between parents and children around the computer screen.

While much has been made of the decline in family time, in fact, the majority of families still spend considerable time together watching television, having family meals, and visiting friends and family. Almost all American adults who live with a partner or a child have dinner with members of their household at least a few times per week, and more than half do so on daily basis.30 Moreover, parents, siblings, and other family members use media together in the context of home and family life. Over one-third of all parents say they play computer and video games, and most of these parents report playing video games with their children and that this brings their families closer together. Gaming and television watching (using digital video recording devices) are the most pervasive shared family activities.31 And, according to the Pew “Networked Families” survey, nearly 90 percent of American parents say they have gone online with their children. More than half of married mothers and onethird of married fathers go online “often” with their children.

However, young people’s experiences of intimate family time may well difer from that of the parents they are sharing it with. What mobile devices and social media have made possible to an unprecedented extent is for young people to express private lives within family time. Especially for teenagers or young adults, maintaining peer networks outside the home and family plays a vital role in the development of their sense of independence and autonomy. Mobile phones are integral to these practices and, arguably, they have changed the power dynamics of parental and peer group interaction for the adolescent. Indeed, these technologies give young people more control over their own time.

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In particular, SMS, or text messages, provide adolescents with a form of interaction that they have adopted and shaped to their own purposes, turning it into “a living form of interaction.” According to Norwegian researchers Rich Ling and Brigitte Yttri, texting’s relatively low cost and the slightly illicit ability to silently maintain contact with friends (for example, during school or in the middle of the night under the bed covers) have been key to its popularity.32 Crucial to its function is the physical nature of the phone—small and portable—and the fact that it is a personal communication device. That is, the mobile phone individualizes communication in that callers reach a specific person rather than reaching a random household member as with the landline telephone. Callers know that they are calling directly to an individual—not to a house phone where they may have to get through the filtering interactions of talking to a parent or another sibling. The mobile call is interpersonal and removes parental scrutiny.

In this way, the mobile phone provides young people with a means of being in touch with friends during times that were traditionally designated as times of family togetherness, such as during meals or on vacations. On one level this is not a new development, as other technologies like television have also permeated family space and reformed how families interact. Nonetheless, the authors conclude that the increase of mobile telephone usage is a distraction from the common focus of the ritual occasion, whether that is a common evening meal or the annual Christmas dinner: “the device steals attention from the shared family experience and thus limits its efect. The technology can undercut the potential for this type of solidarity and the hierarchical dimensions that this form of social structuring implies.” 33

As a counterpoint, I would emphasize that the speed and portability of digital communication may be enabling young people to maintain intimate friendships in new ways. Perhaps, in a distinctive manner, young people are now able to concurrently experience family time and time with friends. Time’s elasticity means that it does not have to be apportioned in a unilinear mode. Rather than thinking about these interactions as exclusively family oriented or peer oriented, and setting up mediated communication in opposition to copresence, we need to complicate our understanding of the forms that intimate relationships can take in this digital era.

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The notion that teenagers have an extended intimate sociality involving an always-on mode of communication emerges strongly from a major US study of the role of digital media and online communication in the lives of youth.34 Social network sites, online games, video sharing, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones have become fixtures of youth culture and enable youth to connect with peers in innovative ways. While many parents and teachers interviewed for the study describe young people’s hanging out with their friends online as “a waste of time,” the authors argue that teenagers integrate new media ways of being together with the informal hanging out practice that have always characterized youth culture.

Notably, most of the direct personal communication that teenagers engage in through private messages, instant messaging, and mobile phone communication involves exchange with close friends and romantic partners, rather than the broader peer group with whom they have more passive access. Teenagers have a “full-time intimate community” with whom they communicate in an always-on temporal mode via mobiles and instant messaging. They use social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter to extend, enhance, and hang out with people they already know in their ofline lives. Just as in the Norwegian study, the vast majority of teenagers use new media to reach out to their friends, casually connecting with them in private communication that is free from parental monitoring. While the expression of these peer social networks via mobiles varies among young people, cross-national comparisons reinforce a sense that in many parts of the world teenagers and children use mobile phones in broadly similar ways across cultures and countries and in broadly diferent ways as compared to adults.35

To summarize, ICTs do not impinge upon or steal private time in any straightforward way. Instead, they extend and reconfigure the time frames of those spaces, making possible new kinds of emotional proximity that are less anchored in shared time and geography. For young people, the so-called digital natives, omnipresent communication devices and social media stream seamlessly into the natural rhythms of daily life.

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New Media Consumption

The salience for my argument of considering young people’s use of new media is not solely because they represent the future. Doing so immediately calls into question the stereotype that everyone has busy lives. As Richard Harper remarks, “Teenagers don’t bewail the fact that they have too many messages.”36 They communicate the most and yet delight in it.

Moreover, rather than always being used with an eye to saving time, mobile devices like television can fill time when there are few other options. Technologies provide an important escape route for youth who feel trapped in situations not of their making. Leslie Haddon and Jane Vincent’s British study of children’s use of mobile phones found that long car journeys were often cited as examples of phone use.37 But children also cited times when they were with others—like parents—but wanted to be elsewhere. In such circumstances, using the mobile phone to play a game or listen to music are ways to mitigate a sense of boredom. It ofers new sites for separation and autonomy, allowing the person to be present but also absent or withdrawn. Children send texts because there is nothing else of interest to do, as well as for positive reasons. For them, intensive media use helps time pass more quickly. The fact that adults, who receive far fewer communications, often complain of being overloaded reflects cultural narratives about ICTs speeding up life rather than simply being a function of the absolute number of mediated communications.

This narrative, in turn, is predicated on portraying past decades as less media infused and less rushed than our time today. But such comparisons are very hard to make. Let’s take, for example, the time we used to spend watching television. Certainly, ownership of televisions has increased markedly, from 1.5 per average US household in 1970 to nearly 3 in 2010.38 This is not necessarily a good indicator of how much time we actually spend watching television and how this relates to the time we now spend on new media.

A key issue is the extent to which new media displaces other ways of spending free time, and thus intensifies the pace of life. Yet there is little consensus about this. Even the figures on whether Internet use (for both communicating and informating) decreases television watching are disputed. According to most estimates, the amount of time given over to watching television seems remarkably large, on average accounting for about half of all leisure time. When this figure is added to estimates of Internet usage, there are not enough hours in the day for this to be plausible.

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Measurement instruments, such as surveys by the World Internet Project and the Pew Research Center, time diaries, and automated monitoring on machines, all have diferent strengths but they do not match up.39 For instance, according to time-diary data, there is no evidence that information technology leads to notable decreases in social life, media use, or other ways of spending both free time and nonleisure time, as claimed in earlier studies. As John Robinson remarks, this “‘more-more’ pattern is hard to explain and may point to the social desirability of doing more. In a society in which being busy is a ‘badge of honor,’ there may be societal pressure on survey respondents to report being more active than they actually are.”40

Several additional factors are in play here. First, television watching is itself a very diferent experience than it was a generation ago. People watch television on various media, and they have much more control over what, when, and where they watch. Second, we know that in many homes television is used, rather like the radio, as background noise or wallpaper. It is on all day but does not require or receive exclusive attention. One can eat and watch television, talk and watch television, iron and watch television, and so on. Third, there is a strong trend toward multimodal connectivity and multiscreen viewing. A survey by Google reported that three-quarters of all TV viewers use another device at the same time in a typical day.41 Moreover, whereas television, radio, and the landline telephone were essentially single-purpose devices, digital devices have a multiplicity of functions. None of the existing ways of measuring technology use listed above can hope to capture the rhythms of time into which ICTs are now so interwoven.

The question, then, is not so much whether new media accelerate the pace of life. Rather, we need to explore the degree to which the uneven difusion of media usage throughout diferent aspects of daily life affects our sense of time. There are not enough hours in the day for all these practices, as they are not discrete, dedicated activities that one can measure in a linear way. If we move away from the binary opposition of mediated/nonmediated, then we can see that time consumption may involve media usage without being dominated by it. Just as debates on television viewing have become sophisticated, diferentiating between diverse forms of television consumption, so too new media consumption should not be regarded on block as a unitary activity. The new devices have capacities that do not require full attention, and therefore time consumption is less linear. So we should not expect time-use data regarding all these changes to correspond with the segmentation of a standard day.

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Work or Play?

Much of my discussion to this point has been framed in terms of worklife balance, and changing forms of labor is a recurring theme. However, rather than work intruding into leisure, social media are forcing us to rethink what actually counts as labor, and even what kind of experience labor is, in the first place. The fact that Internet users create most of the content that makes up the web brings into sharp relief our changing relationship to leisure time. After all, these new types of “digital,” or “virtual,” activities can feel like either work or play. Indeed, there are times when leisure is also labor.

From a political economy perspective, watching television advertisements and using Amazon, for example, can be viewed as forms of work in that they provide audiences and data for corporations. Tracking devices, such as cookies, record Internet users’ browsing patterns and preferences, which can then be monetized through targeted advertisements. Online shopping is big business, with Britons leading the way spending on average over £1,000 a year, often on smartphones and tablets.42

Less visible is the free cultural and technical labor that drives innovation on the Internet: “simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labour on the Net includes the activity of building Web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces on MUDS and MOOs [multiuser text-based virtual environments].”43 Indeed, there are millions of amateur programmers who are motivated by a desire for pleasurable cultural production, their only reward being the social status that comes with being at the frontiers of innovation.

In the case of audiences and advertising, labor is combined with pleasure in the sense that the nonadvertising content is viewed by choice. The delivery of entertainment content is thus a key component of the role of ICTs in work-life balance. Indeed, the life being balanced is not only the life of personal intimacy but of pleasurable recreation and relaxation. Spending time on Facebook, for example, can be read as a form of leisure as well as a form of communication. And while the traditional mass media of newspapers, radio, television, and cinema conveyed content to passive audiences, interactive media ofer a much broader range of emotional and aesthetic expression, engagement and entertainment. By changing the relationship between the technology and the consumer in this way, ICTs arguably have transformed the quality of our leisure time.

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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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