HAVE YOU e-mailed your father lately? And did you do it at 11am?
We might be impressed by how much the mobile phone and the internet have put us in contact with people all around the world, but their biggest impact, it turns out, is on our relationships with family and close friends.
And the peak time for people to send personal mail and texts from work is mid-morning, regardless of the country.
At the second day of the TEDGlobal event in Oxford yesterday, where speakers from a variety of fields are “spreading ideas”, anthropologist Stefana Broadbent explained that the new era of communications has brought the “private sphere” into the office and is leading to a new level of intimacy. What’s more, companies shouldn’t stop it from happening.
Whereas 15 years ago, most workers clocked in to work and largely shut themselves off from any contact with their family and just concentrated on work, Ms Broadbent told of how things have changed to the point where people now use at least 50 per cent of their work e-mail for personal messages, although she added – to knowing laughter from the audience — that “this is probably a conservative figure”.
Yet, despite all the channels we have available to us, it transpires that we mostly use the likes of Facebook and Skype to talk to very few people, and they tend to be the people we already know best. Although the average Facebook user has 120 online friends, they actually only regularly communicate with an average of six people. Meanwhile, 80 per cent of our phone calls are made to just four people, and the average Skype user only uses it to see and talk regularly to two people.
While these findings generally disappoint sociologists, who are downbeat at how all this technology is used to talk to so few people, Ms Broadbent suggested that it’s in fact quite uplifting because the technology is keeping us in contact with family and friends through the day while also helping people keep in touch across great distances. She gave examples of migrants who have left children behind in their home country but who can see and hear them every day over a computer, and of a family who use Skype to have breakfast “with” their grandmother every morning.
In some ways, Ms Broadbent added, it’s a return to the situation of 150 years ago when most people worked on land by their homes instead of behind factory walls. She said it means that employees and schools shouldn’t be so hard on those surreptitiously texting under their desks. Blocking people from texting home “makes me cringe”, said Ms Broadbent, because behind their arguments about security and safety companies are actually tussling with their staff over the right to determine where they focus their attention.
“They’re trying to block this movement towards intimacy,” she concluded.