Oh my god, there is a real person here!
—Lena, twenty-seven, model and online retail distributor1
Exclaiming with a laugh from her computer—midquest and just twenty-four hours after release of a new edition of World of Warcraft—Lena was surprised that she found someone to chat with in her favorite massive multiplayer online game. The other player had apologized for having to step away midgame to check work emails and have a cigarette, at which point Lena recognized that this could be someone her age with whom she could connect, spend time, and maybe even have a laugh in-game.
Lena—one of the first participants in the pilot study for this book—came in to her kitchen from her bedroom, laptop in hand and streaming Korean dramas paused in her browser. She sat down at the kitchen table with me for our interview while her boyfriend set up a new game console at the TV. After outlining how they’ll work together using gaming forums to navigate the complexities of a new open-world action game, she goes on to explain that she really does not care for social networks. As she turns her laptop toward me, I can see that Facebook instant message (IM) chats and notifications fill a corner of her screen, interactions that she says she largely ignores. When pressed, it seems that she does IM often but only with a few of her closest friends because the rest of the people “on here” are “useless.” Why, then, are some digital interactions not considered “real” interpersonal connections while others are, and what does this say about how our perceptions of digital technology and opportunities for interpersonal engagement limit and shape our social world? What is meaningful connection today if we define it in terms of disconnection?
Half in jest, and telling of the everyday tumult and enjoyment of media use, the observations above focus on something that was, or at least should have been, already known. Lena captures a crucial and often overlooked aspect of the everyday experience of using media today, forty years into mobile telephony, thirty years after the dawn of the World Wide Web, and fifteen years since the popularization of internet-ready “smart” phones and the ascendancy of social-media platforms. Her observation is a reminder that will be the first and last note of this book. I’d like you, the reader, to carry that reminder with you as you would your mobile phone, laptop, or other device: to keep engaged and connected to the ongoings of home, work, and current events but also to keep grounded in the interpersonal nature of the communication that constitutes so much of our everyday lives—to consider that when we are connected, we are engaged not merely to technology but with other people, real people.
Panic begets panic.
—Ron, twenty-six, IT support office temp and freelance scriptwriter
Breaking news alerts, work emails, calendar reminders, social-media notifications, and all manner of messages from friends and family—these are the new arbiters competing for our immediate attention. Pressed for time, overwhelmed by notifications, continually switching between the interruptions of diverse connections, the centrality and glut of networked, mobile, and app- and platform-based communication has become characteristic of the diverse occupational contexts known as knowledge work.2 This is the contemporary manifestation of “white collar” work today, inclusive of many types of creative, cultural, and digitally oriented labor. Tasks at hand on any given day are often signaled by a ringtone, vibration, or notification that calls us away, even momentarily, from what we are doing. This was evident as Ron checked and rechecked his email over lunch from the conference room that he had booked for our interview while his colleagues in the UK Civil Service rushed out for a bite to eat. With each glance at a mobile phone, every time an inbox is opened or refreshed, there is accompanying concern—if not a degree of perceived anxiety—about the interruption and possible contingencies calling for our attention. There is also a real sense of anticipation and delight in the interpersonal engagement of a message or comment, post or thread, email or call. The realities of connection today are as social as they are technological; they are also as professional as they are commercially driven by the platform’s decision-makers and associated advertising industries. Connection carries with it both the stressors and pleasures of participating in contemporary everyday life.
Why do I use more media to get away from media?
—Aaliyah, twenty-one, student, production intern, and self-described social-media influencer
Our mobile devices and computers can feel like Trojan Horses. The intensity and duration of a day’s work is punctuated by personal instant-message chats, SMS texts, and personal calls. Social-media feeds, games, and news sites offer palette cleansers among arduous tasks. The pivot to working from home and virtual learning under COVID-19’s lockdowns and social-distancing restrictions was for many accompanied by exhausting, vigilant consumption of local news, an exceptional routine in itself, detailed in Aaliyah’s media diaries and those of the other college and university-age participants from the Greater Toronto Area. We turn to media use as a salve for—and respite from—our other media practices, whittling away time at home or on the bus by consuming online content and by sharing memes, videos, and articles with friends and family.
These media practices are both alluring and invasive. They are carried into contexts and take root in activities that haven’t always been thought of as appropriate for media use. A glance at the phone can ruin a day out; texting can ruin a dinner. Checking email before bed does not bode well for a good night’s sleep; catching a single news update can be a slippery slope when shares, likes, links, and comments follow. When we are connected, each notification carries with it the threat of something akin to communication overload, a state of perpetual nowness, wherein the present moment is extended through a monopolizing imminent need for attentiveness and responsiveness because, for so many of us, the conditions for communication today are abundant. Across the highly connected infrastructures of urban centers and advanced (or post-)industrial economies, many find themselves in a state of near-constant connection, even when not specifically engaged in media use. Defined by subtle degrees of disconnection in everyday life, communication overload is still managed through media use. This is the Janus-faced allure of technological change: it is always the promise, the problem, and the solution.
It is not my job to explain it to them.
—Margaret, thirty, market research analyst
Communication is an interpersonal accomplishment. Connection intervenes—it mediates—and increasingly undoes that work, serving instead to disconnect because not all forms of connection are desirable, mutual, or equitable. Networked digital platforms intertwine our personal as well as professional identities, or, at least, the observable digital traces of how we present ourselves online, by collapsing the distinctions between diverse everyday contexts.3 In turn, constant connection produces coping mechanisms that are better understood in terms of disconnection. At work, Margaret presents a particular persona, aligned with the workplace expectations and the possible misunderstandings of her coworkers and managers alike yet disconnected from a more casually authentic presentation of herself out with friends, in texts or IMs, or across her social-media output.
Public and private, personal or professional, real as opposed to online life, the distinctions that once helped us understand how to organize and structure everyday life—language that we still use today to navigate constant connection—have been blurred to the point of being inverted and, counterintuitively, idealized in terms of those inherent contradictions. From self-censorship on social-media platforms that celebrate connection to navigating standardized workplace expectations that celebrate authenticity, we craft contours to our communication environment, shifting between degrees of connection and disconnection. For Margaret, constant connection is not a wholesale invitation for social surveillance and evaluation by her industry peers: she does not want to offer the details of her private life to be scoured for inconsistencies or, worse, to turn into a lesson on workplace diversity and gender bias for her largely white colleagues and male managers. There is a normative force that accompanies constant connection because the near-conventions of communication carry assumptions that fit each of us differently: where some commit to the emotional labor of self-monitoring and regulation to avoid interpersonal conflict, they are nevertheless met with the policing of communication practices by others, all under the guise of practicality, common sense, or professionalism determined in terms of communication practice. If the consequences of constant connection are social, the realities of disconnection are changing society.
It seems like there’s nobody that you can actually communicate with.
—Farzan, thirty-two, editor
Users who frequent and inhabit networked platform environments turn to them for information and entertainment alike. We depend on these platforms for the interpersonal dimensions of professional and social life, knowing that others do the same, even if in a slightly different way. We collectively contribute to a shared pressure to keep up with the flow of communication; together we produce and reproduce communication overload. Despite the availability of near-constant connection, of feeling “permanently connected” to others,4 there remains a real ambiguity about how we should connect. There are few stable conventions for how we ought to communicate; or rather, there are contradictory near-conventions based on the multiplicity of our diverging perceptions of technological change. For those who keep their mobile phone within arm’s reach, who have lost track of how often they refresh their inboxes and check their screens, there is a worrying ambivalence. Sitting on the curb, a can of lager in hand during our interview, Farzan checked for emails from his boss, who was time zones away in New York, one last time before heading into a club night, unsure about which of his London-based friends had seen his social-media post and would be joining him. Increasingly, so much of users’ time, effort, and attention is focused on managing communication practices, keeping up with connection to the device, platform, or interface rather than connection with others through the platform or technology. What does it say about the trajectory of social change if managing constant connection is persistently experienced as a disconnection from actually engaging with others?
This book’s reminder, again, feels necessary: there are real people here.
Our media have become symbols of social and technological futures that are paradoxically already here—in our hands—while making promises that are paradoxically always just out of reach. Promises of connection and intimacy, convenience and productivity, autonomy, authenticity, and opportunity are accompanied with everyday anxieties about communication overload, online exposure, and the suffocating force of how others feel we ought to communicate. Knowing this experience all too well myself, I ask the question: how did we get here, and what now?
The last four decades have been defined by successive heralds of rapid technological change. Mobile phones and the World Wide Web, smart phones and social-networking sites, through to data-driven platforms, apps, wearables, and toward smart appliances and AI-powered digital assistants—each has become emblematic of a particular decade and the accompanying changes to organization of everyday life that they represent. Such change would be better understood from a triangulated set of perspectives: the phenomenological perspective, which places the experience of everyday individuals and their communication practices in relationship; the materialist perspective of changing media technology, interfaces, and infrastructures that make up our everyday communication environment; and a political-economic perspective that combines the first two through analysis of work and personal life and the surveillance economies of everyday communication technology as they have persisted, diverged, and converged for over a century of coevolution.5
In the 1990s, prominent early adopters included techno-utopians who heralded the World Wide Web as an inherently democratizing force, a possible manifestation of the “Global Village” that broadcast and other “electronic” communications had first inspired.6 Today the intensifying and multiplying roles of media technology are written into so many aspects of everyday life that they have to be reorganized as and through media practices. In North American contexts, roughly 92 to 93 percent of people were using the internet as of 2020 and 2021, in striking contrast to 2010, when only 76 percent and 79 percent of those in the United States and Canada, respectively, had used the internet.7 We also have to consider that from 2019 onward, the majority of these users enjoy multiple modes of access—computer and mobile devices—with only 15 percent of users in the United Kingdom and 17 percent of users in the United States dependent on mobile phones alone.8 Mobile and platform technologies have become facts of life, overlooked and taken for granted but, counterintuitively, having greater consequences both for daily activities and as embodiments of the tumult caused by historical markers of social change.9 In 2016, the use and misuse of social-media platforms and of algorithmically microtargeted political content and ad distribution, as well as user data sets collected and sold in breach of standard practices, contributed to the polarization of public opinion that culminated in alleged voter manipulation in both the UK Brexit referendum and the US presidential election.
In March 2020, the BBC reported that nearly one-quarter of the world’s population was under some form of lockdown, just over ten days into the social-distancing restrictions in Canada and with a strict lockdown announced in India. By April of the same year, the New York Times reported that “nearly four billion people—half of humanity—found themselves under some sort of lockdown.”10 For contrast’s sake: in 2015, Facebook was being used by more than half of the world’s three billion internet users on (at least) a monthly basis, and by 2023, the number of people using Facebook daily had grown to an average of two billion users, a quarter of the world population.11
In 2020, everything went online. Correction: everything that could go online did so, and the realities of what work could not be facilitated by communication technology was brought sharply into focus. COVID-19 restrictions on face-to-face social interaction and movement saw a rapidly increased and intensified dependency on communication technologies, an intensification of digital work that has not unraveled in the long aftermath of the pandemic. This included a rushed embrace of numerous video-chat and networked collaboration platforms, as well as an unprecedented shift in cultural, commercial, and professional operations following on from physical separation and the shuttering of many commercial and public spaces beyond the home. Across the entertainment, retail, and personal care services that were forced to shut down and the often overlooked essential services of transport, security, groceries, and health care, there were and still are higher proportions of individuals from Black and Asian ethnic communities facing a greater loss of life due to COVID-19, indicative of economic inequities that could not be blamed on the virus.
Media use adapted rapidly to connect isolated households in order to continue aspects of interpersonal life that had occurred beyond the home: special occasions with extended family, dinners, and hangouts with friends were scheduled among doctors’ appointments, yoga lessons, client calls, team meetings, and all-company town halls—all on video-call platforms. Schooling, graduation ceremonies, club nights, live concerts, and late-night talk shows were recorded in basements, bedrooms, and kitchens, streamed live for participation virtually. Until the outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter protests, when marches against police brutality and systemic racism filled public spaces across many cities internationally, masses of people under lockdown were en masse only virtually. Even so, the tensions felt acutely during these moments of crisis were (and are) symptomatic of long-standing sets of changes to social life being brought into sharp relief.
The sudden halting and reorganizing of everyday life, work, commerce, education, and entertainment, nearly overnight in many countries, has upended widely held assumptions about the impossibility of large-scale responsive change to the social organization of the status quo. The abruptness of governmental intervention, in tandem with collective social cooperation, has challenged staid conventions and entrenched protocols of our social and economic worlds. But as we learned after the Great Recession of 2008–9, the framing of recovery measured in terms of crisis and an attendant, inevitable return to “normal” belies the longevity of the political-economic tensions and transformations that crisis produces.12 For many, neither the postrecession trajectory of change nor the prepandemic “normal” are sustainable ways forward.
Over the past decade of my fieldwork, I began to see just how intertwined practices of everyday interpersonal life are with these wider societal shifts, how our ability to perceive and navigate the changing opportunities for connection on a day-to-day basis offers one of the most promising starting points for negotiating social change and doing so together. How we collectively find value in connection—how we practice communication—contributes to the construction, reproduction, and negotiation of what we expect and accept as our social reality.
The pandemic and its aftermath have accelerated social processes of change and exacerbated already existing tensions caused by technology; forms of economic uncertainty have accompanied such change. Part of a longer political-economic history of social reorganization, these changes were spurred by the Great Recession, entrenched in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere by a decade of austerity and economic insecurity, brought firmly into everyday public consciousness under the pandemic’s stressors and restrictions.13 The trajectory of these social changes and the tensions they produce are noticeable within the constellation of interdependent everyday social practices, across sets of people interacting through work and nonwork. For the many who have already been slowly pressed into new, rationalized forms of mediated sociality, these changes are part of a longer reorganization of everyday social life parallel to multiplying opportunities for networked communication: social isolation accompanies promises of individual autonomy; a commitment to the pressured workplace does little to stymy economic precariousness;14 a compulsion to connect with others produces daily communication-overload anxieties. These are just some of the contradictions at the heart of contemporary Western life, where promises of personal autonomy, choice, and authenticity act as levers for an unbridled drive toward greater economic productivity and the commercial incursion of technology into nearly every aspect of life.
Communication practices involve the interweaving of individual lives. The contradictions of constant connection are most clearly understood through the experiences of everyday life and the social forms of everyday knowledge produced therein. These flow between multiple sets of individuals interacting with each other, seeking better ways to connect and communicate. Day after day, one foot in front of the other, what is often deemed a “society of individuals” coheres in communication with one another, signaling the acceptance, complacency, frustration, and rejection of particular practices.15 Across diverse settings, norms about how we ought to communicate are diverging, yet conventions are consolidating to produce a new sociality predicated on degrees of disconnection, though communication only succeeds through some degree of mutuality in interpersonal engagement. Throughout this book, I will examine the reproduction and negotiation of these diverging near-conventions in everyday communication. I focus on early career adults in the UK in comparison with Canada, as representative of the Anglo-American West more generally. Across working and personal lives, the communication conventions of these media users are tied to a longer history of political-economic organization of technology use, which after nearly a century has developed into today’s platform-based digital advertising economy.
The transformation of working life in the West is a history of communication management. Technologies and practices of workplace organization set the stage for the emergence and subsequent digital transformation of white-collar work across the breadth of communication-oriented work practices across knowledge, creative, and cultural sectors.16 The widespread embrace of mobile and networked technologies and the ascendancy of platform and data-mining economies represent successive stages in that transformative history of communication management. Alongside the emergence of communication- and knowledge-oriented forms of labor across many sectors of advanced industrial economies, economic crises and neoliberal austerity politics have fostered a series of transformative shifts in everyday social practices.
Communication technologies and their use have become both the needle and the thread of the wider tapestry of everyday life.17 The Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic stand at either end of a decade during which temporal pressures of economic life intensified alongside a seemingly accelerated experience of social life, both amplified by the tools of contemporary surveillance economies. The worlds of work, home, and social life have been colonized. Contours of time and uncertainty shape a new sociality, inextricably mediated by technology. This sociality is a managed, rationalized relationship to the communication environment, which at times displaces relationships with others through that environment. Yet within these same contexts of constant networked connection, in which conditions for communication are in abundance, there are practices that are extending what is and can be considered communication. Forms and patterns of connection are themselves understood and negotiated as expressive acts through which individuals negotiate how communication should and could be occurring in an effort to facilitate change interpersonally. I call these practices of metacommunication.
The communication environment of the individual is where the neoliberal economic policies of the West and the commercial imperatives of platform and data-mining industries meet. It is where the contradictions that they produce can be felt, daily, by citizens-turned-users. The very tensions I have outlined represent levers of political-economic power. The pandemic has shown that these levers can be used to alter the matrices of social organization. The quotidian communication environment offers a site for the continual testing of communication norms: whether or not these norms are justifiably accepted and the related tensions passed on and exacerbated in further engagement with others; whether or not the antisocial and inequitable realties of contemporary society are reproduced and fortified or concertedly examined and displaced. With so much time spent managing and negotiating the pressures of our communication environment, sometimes a reminder is necessary: how we connect and how we communicate matters because there are real people here.
1. Throughout this book, quotations attributed to individuals without a corresponding source note are drawn from my field interviews, media diaries, and thinking-aloud protocol tasks undertaken with research participants between 2010 and 2020, as well as a pilot study in late 2009. All participant names have been anonymized. Personal details have been deidentified and in some cases partially aggregated or swapped where appropriate.
2. See Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Victor M. González and Gloria Mark, “Managing Currents of Work: Multi-tasking among Multiple Collaborations,” ECSCW 2005 (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2005).
3. Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, “Networked Privacy: How Teenagers Negotiate Context in Social Media,” New Media & Society 16, no. 7 (2014).
4. Peter Vorderer et al., Permanently Online, Permanently Connected: Living and Communicating in a POPC World (New York: Routledge, 2017).
5. Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
6. See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); and John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, Feb. 8, 1996.
7. StatsCAN, “Canadian Internet Use Survey 2012,” Nov. 26, 2013; StatsCAN, “Canadian Internet Use Survey, 2020,” July 22, 2021; PEW, “Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet,” PEW Research Center, April 7, 2021.
8. Grant Blank, William H. Dutton, and Julia Lefkowitz, Perceived Threats to Privacy Online: The Internet in Britain. Oxford Internet Survey (Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 2019).
9. Rich Ling, Taken for Grantedness: The Embedding of Mobile Communication into Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
10. “Half the Planet Is on Lockdown, but Not Every U.S. State Is, Even after Alabama Issues an Order,” New York Times, April 28, 2020; BBC, “As It Happened: Coronavirus Deaths Pass 20,000,” BBC.com, March 24, 2020.
11. Katie Hope, “Facebook Now Used by Half of World’s Online Users,” BBC News, July 29, 2015.
12. Giorgio Agamben, States of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Rebecca Bramall, The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
13. Michael Burton, The Politics of Austerity: A Recent History (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016); Stephen Wilks, “Austerity and Outsourcing in Britain’s New Corporate State,” in The Austerity State, ed. Stephen McBride and Bryan M. Evans (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017); Pat Armstrong, “Neoliberalism in Action: Canadian Perspectives,” in Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, ed. Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).
14. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984).
15. Norbert Elias, The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
16. See Catherine McKercher and Vincent Mosco, eds., Knowledge Workers in the Information Society (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2007); David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011); Ursula Huws, Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Andreas Reckwitz, The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New, trans. Stephen Black (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
17. The use of the word society throughout this work relates to the colloquial use of the word and is neither an embrace of the scalar distinction among micro, meso, and macro levels of society, on the one hand, nor of the “flat ontology” of social practices proposed in Theodore Schatzki, “Practice Theory as Flat Ontology,” in Practice Theory and Research: Exploring the Dynamics of Social Life, ed. Gert Spaargaren, Don Weenink, and Machiel Lamers (London: Routledge, 2016). For recent discussions of these uneasy ontological distinctions in relation to the sociological use of practice-oriented research, see Kenzie Burchell, Olivier Driessens, and Alice Mattoni, “Practicing Media—Mediating Practice: Introduction,” International Journal of Communication 14 (2020).
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