So what are the efects of the saturation of everyday life by instantaneous media?
The move to individualized, privatized communication on personal digital devices does mean that more and more of our social relationships are machine-mediated. Our personal time and private activities are punctuated—some say “perpetually disrupted”—by these communications. But interpretations vary between those who see this as increasing freedom and individual autonomy and those who fear a world of perpetual but less meaningful communication. Given how much of our lives is now spent on screens, is there still time to talk?
In chapter 4, I examined the impact of ICTs on the tempo of work at the workplace. In the first part of this chapter, I will focus on their role in redefining the boundaries between work and home and whether this is of more significance to feelings of harriedness than the pace of work itself. Taking issue with much of the literature in this area, I am going to argue against the view that ICTs extend and colonize all time outside the workplace.
In the second part of the chapter, I want to broaden the discussion beyond the all-too-familiar debates about the efect of ICTs on work-life balance. In my view, reframing such debates around the relationship between mediated communication and forms of close personal ties is a more productive way of thinking about these issues. This involves questioning the primacy typically accorded to direct, in-person interaction, which tends to obscure the role of material objects in the dynamics of afiliation. My own approach treats communication as embedded in various technologies that cannot be separated in terms of pure and mediated, with the former assumed to be more “real” than the latter. Digital devices can then be understood as fostering new patterns of social contact, providing a new tool for intimacy.
Multiple mediated forms of connection and distance, and the diferent negotiations that take place around access and availability do disrupt what we once thought of as boundaries between public and private, work and family, labor and leisure. However, rather than worrying about technology intruding on, and poaching, time from intimate moments that we used to think of as somehow “private,” we would be better of reformulating the question in terms of the control that individuals can and do exercise over when and where they make themselves available.
Chapter six
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