Time, technology, and the rhythms of daily life

In this paper we explore the implications of new technologies for performances in relation to work, family time, leisure and other everyday activities. Importantly, we mobilize our analysis around temporal patterns of daily life, rather than deploying cartographic metaphors and the ‘boundaries’ they produce. Through fieldwork informed by five families over a period of three years, we highlight the role that technology plays in constituting the rhythms of contemporary domestic life. We identify four particular rhythms and argue that digital technology is not homogenising time in the home, nor are daily activities demarked by boundaries. Rather, technologies are implicated in reordering the rhythms of domestic life. Attention to the presence of distinct temporal patterns is crucial to understanding everyday life, and to understanding the implications of digital technologies for everyday life.

[1]  B. Latour.  We Have Never Been Modern , 1991 .

[2]  R. Silverstone,et al.  Consuming technologies : media and information in domestic spaces , 1993 .

[3]  Christena Nippert-Eng.  Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life , 1996 .

[4]  Colin Symes.  Chronicles of Labour , 1999 .

[5]  Ulrich Beck,et al.  The Brave New World of Work , 2000 .

[6]  D. Meyer,et al.  Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[7]  Gerald Moore,et al.  Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life , 2005 .

[8]  Daniel G. Bobrow,et al.  What a to-do: studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager , 2004, CHI.

[9]  Christian Licoppe,et al.  ‘Connected’ Presence: The Emergence of a New Repertoire for Managing Social Relationships in a Changing Communication Technoscape , 2004 .

[10]  Michael Arnold,et al.  The Connected Home: probing the effects and affects of domesticated ICTs , 2004 .

[11]  Ned Rossiter,et al.  From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks , 2005 .

[12]  Carol Kaufman-Scarborough,et al.  Time Use and the Impact of Technology , 2006 .

[13]  Martin Gibbs,et al.  Domestic Information and Communication Technologies and Subject-Object Relations: Gender, Identity, and Family Life , 2006 .

[14]  Martin Gibbs,et al.  Parenting in the Connected Home , 2006 .

[15]  Julie B. Olson-Buchanan,et al.  The Use of Communication Technologies After Hours: The Role of Work Attitudes and Work-Life Conflict , 2007 .

[16]  Craig Bellamy,et al.  The material ecologies of domestic ICTs/Les écologies matérielles des ICT domestiques , 2007 .

[17]  Cheryl Geisler,et al.  Work–life boundary management and the personal digital assistant , 2007 .

[18]  David Knights,et al.  Questioning the Construction of 'Balance': A Time Perspective on Gender and Organization , 2008 .

[19]  M. Gibbs,et al.  Domestic orchestration , 2009 .

[20]  Igor Sádaba.  Mobilities , 2009 .

[21]  Wilmar B. Schaufeli,et al.  Exploring types of interference between work and non-work: using a diary study approach , 2009 .