Abstract
In Work’s Intimacy, Melissa Gregg draws our attention to the impact that online technology brings to our contemporary professional and personal lives as she presents evidence from her periodic interviews of 26 Australia-based participants from various levels of workplace hierarchy. The setting of her book is timely as it describes our current generation which has been raised in a society where professional growth is considered as a significant fractional measure of an individual’s fulfillment.
One major contribution of Gregg’s work is her underscoring of the contradiction that online technology brings to our present-day professional and personal lives. On the one hand, Gregg recognizes that online technology enables us to be free from the temporal and spatial constraints of traditional work practices as it affords us the opportunity to work anytime and anywhere. This allows us to pursue professional advancement even while working at a more convenient time and place which, in principle, frees us to follow other pursuits that ideally leads to greater opportunities for developing other aspects of our personal lives. On the other hand, Gregg reminds us that, online technology is likewise freeing our work from temporal and spatial constraints, thereby allowing it to intrude into our personal time and space. In effect, online technology is unwittingly permitting work to be persistently present in our lives.
Importantly, Gregg also emphasizes that work is not only an organizational circumstance but a social experience as well. She presents evidence of how e-mail and Facebook practices, for instance, characterize “presence bleed” (p. 2), as individuals constantly maintain and negotiate professional and social relationships within and outside the gradually ambiguous border of on-and-off-duty space. Thus, not only does online technology allows work to be persistently present in our lives, it is also inadvertently providing a platform for us to be continuously at work.
Nonetheless, even while Gregg speaks of contemporary reality, her current pool of evidence only captures the situations of those who are in a largely networked society—those segments of the population who are located in networked environments. This raises the question of whether those who are on the fringes of the networked world are also similarly experiencing such conditions. Moreover, while Gregg accounted for individual, social, organizational, gendered, generational, and technological aspects of presence bleed, factors such as race, ethnicity, and culture, which could also significantly influence the maintenance or blurring of professional and personal boundaries, were noticeably left out. Furthermore, while Gregg admitted that time constraints prohibited her from conducting more extensive ethnographic work, her narrative data could have been better complemented by extended observations of the working and living circumstances of her participants. This could have provided her study with expansive in-depth insights into presence bleed and the factors that contribute to its occurrence. As a final note, as each chapter was designed to offer contextual evidence of Gregg’s main thesis, incorporating a critical synthesis at the end of each chapter could have delivered more analytical value.
Be that as it may, the aforementioned limitations do not diminish Gregg’s contribution to communication and new media scholarship as her book offers, in a reader-friendly style, a robust literature review as well as a copious accounting and description of first-hand human–technology experiences. Overall, her book is a useful resource for understanding how contemporary technology is redefining the contours of our professional and personal lives.