Abstract
This article explores implications of the central position of the smartphone in an age of constant connectivity. Based on a qualitative study of 50 informants, we ask how users experience and handle temporal ambivalences in everyday smartphone use, drawing on the concepts flow and responsibilization to conceptualize central dimensions of such ambivalences. The notion of conflicting flows illuminates how brief checking cycles expand at the expense of other activities, resulting in a temporal conflict experienced by users. Responsibilization points to how users take individual responsibility for managing such conflicting flows, and to how this practice is difficult and conflict-ridden. We conclude that while individual time management is often framed as the solution to temporal conflicts, such attempts at regulating smartphone use appear inadequate. Our conceptualization of temporal ambivalence offers a more nuanced understanding of why this is the case.
Highlights
This article analyses everyday experiences with the smartphone as an inroad to understand how people experience and manage time in an age of constant connectivity
Reflecting a steep increasing in use, the integration of smartphones in everyday life is fraught with ambivalences
Understanding time as a fundamental dimension of media use, we have argued that the concept temporal ambivalence captures essential aspects of everyday experiences with the smartphone, and thereby of time management in digital society
Summary
This article analyses everyday experiences with the smartphone as an inroad to understand how people experience and manage time in an age of constant connectivity. The mobile phone is taken for granted (Ling, 2012) and woven into a range of everyday life practices (Richardson and Hjorth, 2017). It is both an emblem of transforming relationships with time in everyday media use, and a tool for managing these transformations. The question remains as to how smartphone users balance between positions in their everyday lives This question, we argue, points to fundamental concerns about how people experience and manage time in digital societies. Temporal dimensions have long been part of theorization of the cultural and social organization of media in everyday life (Morley, 1992; Radway, 1984; Scannell, 1996), but emerges as ever more central in the context of constant connectivity and devices such as the smartphone (Hall et al, 2018; Rauch, 2018)
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