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| 71 6 Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle danah boyd I love filling out surveys, but I’m always stumped when I’m asked how many hours per day I spend online. I mean, what counts as online? I try to answer this through subtraction. I start by subtracting the hours that I sleep (~7.5 if I’m lucky). But then a little bird in the back of my brain wonders whether or not sleeping with my iPhone next to my bed really counts. Or maybe it counts when I don’t check it, but what about when I check Twitter in the middle of the night when I wake up from a dream? I subtract the time spent in the shower (0.5) because technology and water are not (yet) compatible. But that’s as far as I can usually get. I don’t always check Wikipedia during dinner, but when there’s a disagreement, the interwebz are always there to save the day. And, I fully admit, I definitely surf the web while on the toilet. Y’see . . . I’m part of a cohort who is always-on. I consciously and loudly proclaim offline time through the declaration of e-mail sabbaticals when all content pushed my way is bounced rather than received. (There’s nothing more satisfying than coming home from a vacation with an empty inbox and a list of people so desperate to reach me that they actually called my mother.) But this is not to say that I only have “a life” when I’m on digital sabbatical. I spend plenty of time socializing face-to-face with people, watching movies , and walking through cities. And I even spend time doing things that I’d prefer not to—grocery shopping, huffing and puffing on the treadmill, and so on. All of these activities are not in and of themselves “online,” but because of technology, the online is always just around the corner. I can look up information, multitask by surfing the web, and backchannel with friends. I’m not really online, in that my activities are not centered on the digital bits of the Internet, but I’m not really offline either. I’m where those concepts break down. It’s no longer about on or off really. It’s about living in a world where being networked to people and information wherever and whenever 72 | danah boyd you need it is just assumed. I may not be always-on the Internet as we think of it colloquially, but I am always connected to the network. And that’s what it means to be always-on. There is an irony to all of this. My always-on-ness doesn’t mean that I’m always-accessible-to-everyone. Just because my phone buzzes to tell me that a new message has arrived does not mean that I bother to look at it. This is not because I’m antiphone but because I’m procontext. Different social contexts mean different relationships to being always-on. They are not inherently defined by space but by a social construction of context in my own head. Sometimes I’m interruptible by anyone (like when I’m bored out of my mind at the DMV). But more often, I’m not interruptible because connection often means context shift, and only certain context shifts are manageable. So if I’m at dinner, I will look up a Wikipedia entry as a contribution to the conversation without checking my text messages. All channels are accessible, but it doesn’t mean I will access them. I am not alone. Like many others around me, I am perpetually connected to people and information through a series of devices and social media channels . This is often something that’s described in generational terms, with “digital natives” being always-on and everyone else hobbling along trying to keep up with the technology. But, while what technology is available to each generation at key life stages keeps changing, being always-on isn’t so cleanly generational. There are inequality issues that mean that plenty of youth simply don’t have access to the tools that I can afford. But economic capital is not the only factor. Being always-on works best when the people around you are always-on, and the networks of always-on-ers are defined more by values and lifestyle than by generation. In essence, being always-on started as a subcultural...

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