Overall, the study found that employees actively manage the degree to which ICTs allow their personal lives to enter the workplace. While they take advantage of the possibility of engaging in personal mediated communication, at the same time, they engage in multifaceted strategies to restrict such permeability. This results in individually nuanced interfaces through which people from workers’ personal lives have varying degrees of access to that worker. In this way, the engineers developed what might be thought of as a hierarchy of accessibility. While partners, close family members, and children are permitted to communicate by telephone (either landline or mobile), communication with friends is lower down the hierarchy, involving e-mail or texting. In other words, immediate access is denied to this group. Such research highlights the finely tuned ways in which workers utilize the materiality and functionality of technologies both to facilitate and impede contact with particular people at particular times.
In sum, fears that the constant availability aforded by mobile devices has accelerated the pace of life beyond people’s perceived capacity to cope comfortably are exaggerated. Using mobiles does not straightforwardly lead to an increased sense of being rushed or pressed for time. More frequent use does not even lead to the experience of harried leisure. Indeed, it seems that the “always-on” character of digital technologies provides new opportunities for flexible coordination, counterbalancing any uncomfortable increase in time pressure.
Networked Families
At one level, then, portable devices enable us to organize more flexibly and eficiently and thus save time overall. Indeed, for Rich Ling, the mobile phone has completed the automobile revolution. “Where the automobile allows flexible transportation, up until the rise of mobile telephony there has been no similar improvement in the real-time ability to coordinate movements. When you were en route, you were incommunicado. The mobile telephone completes the circle.”16 So, for example, by redirecting travel that has already begun, the mobile reduces transportation time. Harking back to Lewis Mumford’s famous line about the clock being “not merely a means of keeping track of hours, but of synchronizing actions,” Ling argues that the mobile phone now competes with or supplements the wristwatch as the ultimate technology of micro-coordination.17
Time to Talk
145