The Social Life of Information – Chapter 3: Home Alone
The chapter I read from this book made me acknowledge the introducing of the landline telephone. As a testimony of old usage where telegraph where reserved to experts, telephone where the first brand new irresistible intrusion into privacy as there where no way to know who was calling and the emergency level of the call.
At that time the computer was thought to be used as a way to allow people to work from home and avoid each other. A tool for isolation that revealed to be a bad idea for productivity at work.
That chapter also briefly talks about the impact of usage on technologies : applications and usages of email and video games had a profound socializing effects on some fairly antisocial technologies that reminded me that we communicate a lot on workspaces, on devices that are made for work and productivity, and in our today usages the two are constantly alternated (work and personal communication).