Work's Intimacy

This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of today's salaried professionals to provide an intimate insight into the personal, family and wider social tensions faced by workers in today's rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often to the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of these technologies, which have helped to move work out of the office and into cafes, trains, living rooms, dining rooms and bedrooms, thereby impinging in new and unforeseen ways on the personal lives of employees. This groundbreaking book explores how today's salaried professionals cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.

Melissa Gregg is Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is author of Cultural Studies' Affective Voices and co-editor of The Affect Theory Reader (with Gregory J. Seigworth).