Always-On/Always-on-You: The Tethered Self

The self occupies a liminal space between the physical real and its digital lives on multiple screens. The expression “phoning it in” used to be pejorative. It implied a lack of appropriate attention to what might be novel about a task at hand. Now, as pure description, it provides a metric for status; it suggests that people are important enough to deliver their work remotely. The job of adolescence is centered around experimentation—with ideas, with people, with notions of self. When adolescents play an online role playing game they often use it to recast their lives. They may begin by building their own home, furnishing it to their taste, not that of their parents, and then getting on with the business of reworking in the virtual world what has not worked so well in the real. The validation and enabling are becoming commonplace rather than marked as childlike or pathological.