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“ALWAYS ON” — DEALING WITH A CONSTANT AVAILABILITY ADVANTAGES OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING Ata glance, ubiquitous computing offers many advantages. But it perpetuates processes that are blurring boundaries and intensifying work. Well known is the blurring of boundaries and fragmentation of work and life by the discourse about work-privacy-conflicts: Work enters private time and space and vice versa private life enters work. The perpetuating elements of ubiquitous computing are the multiple blurring of boundaries of time, space and reality/virtuality by being always-on as well as the blurring of boundaries of artefacts by converging functions.’ It seems as if just the sky might be the limit. And most users perceive this process of blurring of boundaries and intensification of work by smart devices ambivalently but with mostly positive tendencies.!° There is a neuroscientific approach" trying to explain this behaviour by release of dopamine in a process of rewarding, but still there is no proof for that. THE OTHER SIDE: INTEREST IN RISK-TO-SELF But it also fits into another model: Many users show a mindset as ,interest in risk-to-self‘ as it could be seen in texting whilst driving’* or more subtle in mobile working during vacation. A self-endangerment due to various reasons (e. g. career, personal advantages, and job- or livelihood security) pressurizes the individual to be ‘always on’. It manifests in an involvement in smart device use. Recently this involvement is proven in a study on youth of 8 to 14 years to be heavy (21 %) or very heavy involved (8 %) even with endangerment of addiction to smart device use.!? But yet there is — like occupational burn-out — no common description of smart device or Internet addiction as a mental Volker Jorn Walpuski, Always on. Vom Umgang mit Smart Devices, Supervision. Mensch — Arbeit — Organisation, 31 (4) (2013) 30-37. Walpuski, Always on; Volker Jörn Walpuski, Smart Devices in Organisationen: Von Regelungen für die Allgegenwärtigkeit von computergestützter Kommunikation, Organisationsberatung Supervision Coaching (OSC), 39, (1) (2014) 99-114, DOI: 10.1007/s11613-014-0359-z. See among others: Maartje Schermer. The Mind and the Machine — On the Conceptual and Moral Implications of Brain-Machine Interaction, in Nanoethics, 3rd December 2009, Springer, 217-230. Walpuski, Always on; Volker Jörn Walpuski, Ubiquitous Computing und Gruppendynamik. Überlegungen zu Smart Devices als gruppendynamisches Phänomen, Gruppendynamik und Organisationsberatung, 2015/3, online first: DOI: 10.1007/s11612-015-0283-5. Karin Knop - Dorothee Hefner - Stefanie Schmitt — Peter Vorderer, Mediatisierung mobil. Handy- und Internetnutzung von Kindern und Jugendlichen, Leipzig (Vistas), Schriftenreihe Medienforschung der Landesanstalt für Medien Nordrhein-Westfalen (LfM), Band 77, 2015. * 127 +
