Managing Personal Accessibility in a Wired World
	ON/OFF was a one-year project with a mission to explore and document social aspects of the use of communication technologies in a variety of cultural settings, with a special focus on the impact that widespread adoption of mobile communication technologies (and the resulting phenomenon of perpetual accessibility) has had on people's sense of place, their sense of self, their relationships to one another, and their ability to manage the various roles they are required to fulfill in daily life. Our research team produced a short, ethnographic film about the ways that mobile and ubiquitous communication technologies (primarily cellphones, laptops, and pagers, but also desktop email and instant messaging) are affecting people's lives -- affecting how we communicate with family members and colleagues throughout the day, and changing how we expect other people to behave in public and in private places. Our crew of ethnographic researchers and documentary filmmakers travelled around the globe throughout the year 2002. In addition to filming in Chicago, we visited London, England, Recife, Brazil, and Shanghai, China. In each city, our team met with families in their homes, followed them to work and to school, and recorded their stories about the impact that mobile communication technologies have had on their everyday lives. The finished film represents a small sampling of the many stories we heard. It was first screened in December 2002 for a gathering of innovative thinkers -- sociologists, anthropologists, business strategists, product designers, engineers, and experts in emerging technologies. The film was meant to inform and inspire that group as, together, they imagined future scenarios of mobile communication technology use. We hope that our film will also serve a larger purpose. The stories that we have recorded from ordinary people around the world document a transitional moment in the human experience of communication technologies. They can educate us about cross-cultural differences and similarities in technology use, and they can remind us about how our lives change as we adjust to new ways of communicating. "ON/OFF: Managing Personal Accessibility in a Wired World" is a project of ID's Tangible Knowledge Research Consortium, the membership of which currently includes Motorola, Steelcase, SBI/Lante, and Zebra Technologies. Comments or questions about our project should be directed to the project lead, Jay Melican (jaym@id.iit.edu).
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