Welcome to the always-on world

With the growth of new information and communications technologies, each human relationship is becoming a continual presence. You can exchange a dozen brief cell phone conversations with your spouse every day. You can keep track of your money through on-line banking. Your computer-mediated work activities can always be visible to your co-workers. This is a tremendous shift in human relationships: from episodic to always-on. The always-on world presents a series of challenges: interruptions-the ringing cell phone in the theater is just the start; divided attention-when every relationship is present everywhere, all the time, it becomes necessary to juggle commitments; addiction-some people can´t stop reading their e-mail; boundaries-parents often give their children beepers or cell phones to keep track of them, which is disturbing to many children; other new technologies-for example, electronic payments-make other kinds of tracking possible as well. The always-on world is a world of freedom, but it is also a world of anonymous global forces that ceaselessly rearrange all relationships to their liking. We don´t understand this world very well, but there will soon be plenty of opportunity to study it first-hand