34 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age the coming convergence. Things will be networked, because they can. As we write this, broadband Internet connections have just been transformed from a novelty into a commodity in typical Western households. Cable and xDSL-based access has just become stable, fast, and cheap enough to entice people to the notion of always-on Internet. This is a fundamental change: connecting to the Internet no longer requires waiting for modem dialups and callbacks, so people start to perceive it as an ever-present part of their world that can be sum- moned at whim. Similar changes in life are happening all the time as communication technology advances. Arguably, wireless communications has given people more freedom than most other areas of communication technology. The mobile phone has irrevocably transformed our society. The sociologists are still out in the fi eld to study these rapid changes, but even without scholarly proofs we know that our life has changed in a number of ways. For some of us, life has become a little more relaxed. We no longer need to make elaborate plans to meet people for lunch in a busy city – we just agree to call when we get into town. The Helsinki youth, our 19 mobility benchmark, fl ock in the city centre in patterns driven by ad hoc information they receive from their friends. They do not bother to agree on a place where to meet with their skateboarding buddies, but instead monitor the location of people and get together with the help of text messages and mobile chat. For others, life has become more hectic. The mobile phone extends the reach of the corporation everywhere. We can be working any- where, all the time. Some praise this newly found 24/7 freedom; some have become slaves to it. Our society is still adapting to this new ability to be always on. Mobile phones are currently the most visible form of global wireless connectivity. For personal content, the other important mobile channel must be WLAN. Especially in North America, but also in China and South Korea, WLAN is reaching millions of mobile Internet users in cafés, stores, and on the street. While many of the networks are private and closed, there is an increasing movement towards networks avail- able to general public. The typical WLAN application is normal Internet use – browsing, e-mail, blogging, chatting – but new uses are emerging. Voice-over-IP clients are now available for laptops, PDAs, and phones. There are 19 Helsinki is one of the fi rst mobile cities where cellular technology truly has affected the behavioural patterns of the youth since the mid-1990s (Kopomaa 2000).