Chapter Six Time to Talk
Intimacy through Technology
People’s ecstasy concerning the triumphs of the telegraph and telephone often makes them overlook the fact that what really matters is the value of what one has to say, and that, compared with this, the speed or slowness of the means of communication is often a concern that could attain its present status only by usurpation.
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
When Volkswagen announced that it would stop sending e-mails to employees after ofice hours, the Independent newspaper declared “victory for Volkswagen workers who just wanted to be left alone.”1 The article continued by emphasizing that the “tyranny of the out-of-hours e-mail from the boss has plagued workers the world over ever since the introduction of the BlackBerry. But now, after years of subjugation, one group of workers has struck a blow for freedom.”
That our private time is being encroached upon by ubiquitous connectivity is widely regarded as driving the frantic pace of modern life. There are plentiful discussions about the inexorable extension of working time, reflected in terms such as work-to-family spillover, the colonization of time, and the blurring, merging and morphing of work-life boundaries. While the idea that the preoccupations of work can “spill over” into nonwork life is familiar, the ease with which digital devices teleport work into spaces and times once reserved for personal life represent a qualitative shift in the dynamic. The potential for work to invade every nanosecond is said by some to spell the end of pure, uninterrupted leisure time.
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