Intimacy at Work ─ How Digital Media Bring Private Life to the Workplace

According to some social critics, the digital age involves a retreat into the isolation of intelligent machines. Acclaimed scholar Stefana Broadbent takes another view, that digital technologies allow people to bring their private lives into the often alienating world of work. Through ethnographic evidence and data gathered from large samples in Europe and the U.S., Intimacy at Work looks at a paradox in modern life: Although human beings today spend so much of their waking hours working, they remain increasingly connected to family and friendsbecause of digital and social media. This book
-shows how portable communications sustain personal networks offering a sense of identity, comfort, support, and enjoyment in the workplace;
-demonstrates through numerous case studies that digital technologies provide a kind of safety net” in times of economic crisis, softening the precariousness of existence;
-is a revised edition of a volume published in French (L’Intimite au Travail, 2011), which won the prestigious AFCI Prize for books on business communications.

Stefana Broadbent earned a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh and contributed to The Onlife Manifesto (Springer, 2015) and Digital Anthropology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). Editions of Intimacy at Work have been published in French (L’Intimite au Travail, FYP Editions, 2011) and Italian (Internet lavoro e vita private, Il Mulino, 2013). For the last 20 years Broadbent has studied the social, cultural, and cognitive aspects involved in the use of technology at work and at home. She is currently Head of Collective Intelligence at Nesta, an independent charitable organization in the UK, where she does research into how networked groups find new ways to collaborate with one another. Previously she was a lecturer in digital anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at University College, London.