Mobile Phones and the Work/Life Boundary

Sydney.
The next keynote speaker here at Mobile Media 2007 is Judy Wajcman. Her focus is especially on the question of work/life balance in a mobile environment, and she highlights the home-to-work and work-to-home spillover which mobile technologies have made possible. Such spillover can be both positive and negative, even though research focus has been mainly on negative aspects; this is a shift from earlier interest in developing family-friendly work/life policies. At any rate, the boundaries of home and work are clearly being blurred, and the mobile phone is often positioned as a threat to the quality of personal life (while others also see it as an enabling technology, of course).

We're only just beginning to understand the processes of interchange between mobile technologies and the processes of everyday life. Much such research adopts a rather static model of the home, however, while mobile phones and their study enable a reconceptualisation of the interrelation between home and work. Clearly, before the mobile phone, the existence of separate home and office fixed phone lines indicated a strong separation between personal and work-related uses; the mobile phone has blurred this separation and has become an integral part of all aspects of life.

Many recent studies conceptualise mobile technologies as work-extending technologies, and associate mobile use with negative work-to-home spillover; however, such studies often focus mainly on professionals and managers and may therefore not be fully representative. The blurring of boundaries may not be the most important focal point, however; what is becoming more important is a focus on the ability of individuals to manage such spillovers. This also requires a reconceptualisation of family practices; indeed, all of family members' day-to-day practices may be seen as contributing to the everyday construction of the idea of 'family' instead.

The idea of the home isn't necessarily fixed in space; it is constructed instead through ongoing coordination between family members, and the mobile phone with its affordances of micro-coordination may therefore be a key tool for this process of 'doing family'. Entities achieve their form in the process of interacting with other entities, much in the way as described by actor-network theory. Family practices are mutually configured with mobile devices; a new repertoire for managing social relations emerges, and this may change the quality of intimate relationships. The mobile phone becomes a technology of intimacy, capable of being taken outside of the home.

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