My last post (and various on and offline responses to it) have gotten me thinking about what sorts of things we’re always connected to. I’ve been thinking in terms of simply being “always connected” and not paying much attention to the blank that follows (being “always connected to _______”). Or maybe I’ve been filling in that blank with something along the lines of “telecommunications grid.” Either way, I think I need to consider what else can complete that phrase.

So, just off the top of my head, here’s a list of a few things we can be connected to: faith/God (as discussed in previous post), family and friends, the community, our past/heritage, nature.

But the kind of constant connectivity I’m talking about is a literal connection. Though there may not be an actual wire connecting my device to the telecommunications grid, with it I have a connection to the internet and through that, the world. This physical connection can lead to being in perpetual contact with family, friends and co-workers. But it has nothing to do with a more spiritual connection to nature, faith, etc… Like I said before, that connection - when it exists - does not require a cell phone or the internet.

So, what have I learned from this little thought exercise? That the “always connected” I’m talking about is the communication-enabling internet connection one gets with laptops, smartphones, PDAs, etc… And as an organizational communication scholar, I am interested in the ways we talk about and make sense of that kind of constant connection. How does being always connected to the telecommunications grid impact being (always) connected to work?

I’m working on the pilot study for my dissertation - a content analysis of blog posts about being always on. In searching for appropriate posts to analyze, I’ve come across a number of references to being “always connected” to God. This is by no means the focus on my study (nor an area of my expertise), but I find the use of these terms - always on, always available, always connected, perpetual contact and so on - in terms of faith and religion quite interesting.

My study focuses on the ways people talk about being always connected to others through communication technologies; specifically I want to know how this impacts communication with and about work. But I might learn something about this by paying attention to the other ways people use these terms, as they do when talking about their connections to their faith. Faith and work are two incredibly important spheres in many people’s lives, so it makes sense that they would be the focus of this kind of talk. For many, their relationship with God is the original always-on relationship. I’m not even going to begin to discuss how the always-on relationship with work interacts with that relationship with faith (I don’t want to even suggest that one might supplant or take away from the other); I just think it is interesting to look at the other things people are always connected to. And this particular one doesn’t require an iPhone or even an internet connection!

We got our SXSW Interactive passes today! I’m very excited; for two years now, I’ve regretted not going after hearing all the cool things people were talking about. So this year, the husband and I were both determined to go.

So maybe this will be the motivating, energizing conference I’ve been looking for. Tons of the scheduled panels seem relevant to my dissertation, I am definitely looking forward to hearing Steven Johnson and Frank Warren speak, and even the kid from Facebook might be interesting. I can shop my dissertation project around, recruit some interviewees, maybe get some leads on post-graduation work. Anyway, it should be a good way to spend spring break this year. More on this in March…

One of the main goals of my dissertation is operationalizing this idea of “always on.” But something I’ve been wrestling with this week is the difference between being always on and being always available. I’m still working this out, but I’m starting to wonder if what I’m actually interested in being always available.

Being always on implies action, behavior. A person who is always on is constantly engaged, always doing something or talking to someone.

Being always available suggests something more akin to a state of preparedness. It’s being ready for interaction, but not necessarily always engaged in interaction.

Theoretically, I think there are a few key differences suggested by these two terms. There’s a difference between degrees of participation; always on is active participation, but always available is more passive. There’s also a difference between communication direction and control; always on implies individual as sender and seeker, always available implies individual as receiver.

Then again, the popular use of the term “always on” suggests that a person is constantly connected to the world via the internet and any number of ICTs, even if that person is not actively using those connections. The fact that I can check my email and get directions on my cell phone whenever and wherever I want means I’m always on. Or does it?

Looks like I’ve got some thinking to do.

I’ve finally completed revisions on my prospectus! (Maybe later I’ll post about how hard it is for me to make and meet my own internal deadlines.) I’m pretty pleased with the general direction in which I’m heading, but of course there are myriad areas for improvement. I guess that’s why I have a committee - nothing like getting your hard-fought work ruthlessly critiqued by those who are older and wiser.

My working title is: How does being “always on” impact our experience at work?: Exploring continuous connectivity from an organizational communication perspective. Here’s a brief overview of my project (excerpted from the prospectus itself):

The list of significant information and communication technologies (ICTs) gets longer every year. As of right now, this list includes well-established technologies such as cell phones and email, as well as more recent innovations like Blackberries and the iPhone, instant messaging (IM), and increasingly ubiquitous wireless internet access. Together, these technologies form a nearly seamless web of connectivity, a state of perpetual contact, where an individual is “always on.”

With my dissertation, I seek to understand the implications of being always connected to the world via these technologies, with the ultimate goal of developing a model of being always on. We are quickly approaching the point of perpetual contact, where we can be reached at any time in any place, anywhere in the world. Cascio and Shurygailo (2003) refer to this as the “new paradigm of work—anytime, anywhere, in real space or in cyberspace” (p. 362). How does this state of being always on impact communication?

Technology use tends to fall along a continuum; some people cannot seem to ever turn their cell phones off, even when they are at home or on vacation, yet others refuse to buy a cell phone at all. Some people are required to keep phones or pagers on at all times because of their jobs, and others are constantly using their phones to project an image of status or importance. By talking to individuals at all points in the continuum of perpetual contact, from the non-users to the super-users, I will get a more comprehensive and complete view of the important issues of being always on. I want to learn how individuals make sense of being always on (or being always off). I want to learn about the positive and the negative effects. I want to know how this shapes their experiences at work, as well as how this affects their home lives. My ultimate goal is to develop a comprehensive model of being always on, from antecedents to processes to consequences.

This research has real implications to our everyday lives, both as members of organizations and as people living in contemporary society. These implications range from learning more about how to be productive at work to how to effectively communicate across physical and temporal distances, from how to manage a multitude of communicate technologies and an increasing amount of information to how to balance work and life concerns. These are issues all of us deal with every day, even when we are not at work. Understanding these issues can help us be more productive and more healthy.

I’m currently involved in an interesting project investigating the use of ICTs during organizational meetings. Specifically, we’re looking at the different ways people use ICTs (such as Blackberries and other smartphones/PDAs, IM, email, etc…) to multitask during meetings. We’re most interested in the communicative aspects of multitasking (termed “multicommunicating” by Reinsch, Turner and Tinsley in a forthcoming Academy of Management Review article). This includes behaviors such as venting to others, providing social support, furthering understanding of meeting content, etc… during a meeting. When done with ICTs, these interactions become almost invisible, like a form of digital note passing.

What makes this study interesting to me is its connection to my work on being always on. Preliminary findings are fairly interesting. For example, we’re not seeing a relationship between a person’s age and her tendency to multicommunicate with ICTs during a meeting. Going into this study, I would have expected that younger employees (let’s say 40 and below) would be much more likely to do this, but our results aren’t really showing that. I wonder how age will factor into my dissertation work. Maybe younger people are not more likely to be always on…

One thing we are confirming is the importance of organizational norms. This is one of those “well, duh” sort of conclusions, but it’s great to demonstrate it with data. It looks like people are more likely to multicommunicate in meetings if they feel that others in their organization also do it, and that it’s acceptable and appropriate to do so.

Anyway, there’s a lot more going on with our data, so as we’re figuring it out, I’ll post more.

So everyone’s been talking about Pew’s most recent research report, this one about identity management online. Specifically, this report discusses self-Googling (which, no matter how old I get, is always going to make me giggle just a little bit) and the ways adults and teenagers manage their privacy online.

I don’t have anything that new or different to say about these results, but I wanted to take a minute to think about what it means to be one of those “young adults” profiled in the study. At some points in the report, Pew differentiates simply between teens and adults, while at other times the adults category is broken out by smaller age ranges. So I would fall into the category of 18-29 year olds. Which seems like a big range to me - as someone rapidly approaching the top end of this group, I feel like my web habits are quite different than those of an 18 or 19 year old.

I imagine that people near the limits of all age ranges feel like this. But I wonder if we wouldn’t learn something very important from focusing on this bridge group. Sure, people in their 20s are technically, biologically adults - many of them even have children of their own- but they (we) are only recently removed from their teen years. They live right on the border between youth and adulthood, and as such, can offer interesting perspectives from both viewpoints. College students are easy and plentiful targets for academic studies, but they can also provide useful insight into these kinds of issues.

Nick Carr suggests - somewhat sarcastically, of course - that one reason adults may not worry so much about privacy is that they don’t have as much crazy stuff to worry about keeping private. Sure, the older a person is, the fewer keg stands she does (that kind of gymnastics is really bad for my aging back). But I know plenty of adults (and not just the 18-29 year olds) who have all kinds of crazy things to keep private, for possibly more significant reasons than teenagers. Identity theft, losing jobs, getting kicked out of school, or worse - what if your kids Google you? I wonder why more adults aren’t more concerned. This is where I think this bridge group of young adults is important.

We can learn a great deal about this and similar issues by talking to those who, though they may be very comfortable with technology and have been online a long time, they have not always done it. Many of us have only been using the internet since high school or college, less than half our lives. So instead of growing up using tools like Facebook and IM, we’ve had to learn it along the way. But we started learning when we were young, so it’s not very difficult for us. It’s just that we are caught somewhere between the millennials with their superspeed texting and web businesses they started when they were 12 and the seniors who finally got a Yahoo account to look at pictures of their grandchildren (forgive these simplistic stereotypes; I’m just making a point). I think it’s this group that can help us understand more about really what’s going here.

But maybe I think that because I’m one of those young adults and I just want people to pay attention to me. I’m interesting, really; just check out my Flickr page. Though, to really see how interesting I am, you’ll have to be one of my friends since I’ve made all the really interesting pictures private.

A recent article in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication explore some of the more productive uses of instant messaging. This is an interesting article for me because it reveals some important issues related to being always-on, and doesn’t simply focus on the negative aspects, such as interruption, work/life balance, goofing off, etc… I’ll be getting into these issues more very soon, but I wanted to get things started by pointing out this article.

Over on the Effusia blog, Hayes has posted a few of his thoughts on this issue, from the perspective of someone deeply vested in the organizational uses and implications of IM. For now, read his post and I’ll post my own thoughts very soon.

So a year or two ago, I started an org comm literature wiki. Over the life of this wiki, it has gone from a personal experiment to a collaborative space where a colleague and I shared interesting and relevant articles for our research to my most useful citation management tool. I spent a great deal of time on the wiki this summer in preparation for my comprehensive exams. I am coming back to the wiki now to manage my prospectus and dissertation sources.

So I’m back from the annual meeting of the National Communication Association (in Chicago this year - one of my favorite cities, but so very cold in November that my thin Texas skin can’t take it). I tend to get easily worn out by these huge conferences and I never attend as many panels I as I tell myself I should. This year was no exception. I was pretty disappointed by some of the panels I attended, and that really wore down my resolve to attend more. I did hear some interesting papers about work/life balance, but some of the org comm technology papers were surprisingly boring or outdated. I am hoping that might motivate me to write a really awesome dissertation.

So now that Thanksgiving is winding down, I guess it’s time for me to get to work. I’ve set a deadline for myself that I’ll have a draft of my prospectus written by Christmas. That gives me one month. And this blog is going to be my public(ish) commitment to that deadline. I’m going to post frequent updates on my process and my progress in an effort to get and keep going. So here I go - I will deliver a prospectus draft in 26 days.