It seems we love using our mobiles and the internet to connect to the world but we are also very concerned about protecting our personal space.  Based on your feedback from my last blog, Australians are embracing telecommunications to reach out to family and friends and make work more flexible… but we also like to switch off, particularly when it comes to work.

These were strong themes emerging from more than 50 pieces of feedback I’ve received so far from my Blog on Exchange and on Telstra’s internal intranet.  In the blog I asked for your thoughts on how communication technologies are impacting on society and if a new digital social etiquette is developing.

The strongest theme to come from your feedback was our enhanced ability to communicate with friends and family.  One reader shared his story about how he uses the social networking site Qik to stream real time video of his young son for his parents to watch, half way around the world. Another said, “mobile video calls allowed me to watch my five month old niece and her two and a half year old sister grow during some very important developmental stages – and made sure they didn’t forget their auntie!”.

Your feedback also highlighted the importance of the internet for education and for creating new work environments. One reader said, “I personally like being able to work wherever I am. I also like not having to be a slave to the time clock at work”.

While you made the social benefits of these technologies pretty clear, you also underlined some fairly universal annoyances and concerns. The most common was the blurring of boundaries between work and personal life. As one reader put it, ”The idea that you are available 24×7 is crossing over from personal life to career and vice versa. I think the great challenge this presents our generation is how do we move from the 40 hr week into the hybrid personal/professional world”.

This idea of blurred boundaries also crossed over into our social lives, with many objecting to people using mobiles on buses and trains, or while having a face-to-face conversation: “The way people place priority over the information on their mobile device rather than the interaction they are having with the person sitting in front of them”.

On the question of social etiquette, most feedback indicated that it should follow the conventions of normal social behaviour, and it will continue to develop over time. As one reader put it,  “Normal manners should apply”.

However, several readers gave us an important warning about being careful with comments and actions in the online world: ”People need to think very carefully before hand as to what they choose to say on a very public platform that has the potential to be viewed by many people including those with differing cultural beliefs & practices”.

An interesting study worth having a look at:

Thanks to everyone for your contributions so far.   As a follow-up I thought I’d alert you to an interesting study released last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.   Titled Social Isolation and New Technology it debunks, to a large extent, the view that the internet and mobile telephones are making people more isolated.   It does confirm that the discussion networks of Americans are smaller and less diverse than they were 25 years ago.  However it finds there is little or no relationship between the narrowing of people’s discussion networks and their use of the internet and mobile phones.

On the contrary, it finds that people who use these technologies are more likely to broaden their discussion networks to include people from different backgrounds.  Quite intriguing to me was the finding that people who use the internet are actually more likely to be sociable with their neighbours, while mobile phone users and bloggers are more likely to join local community groups or charities.   To some extent, users of social networking sites are less involved in their local communities.  However there are very strong links between people’s overall core networks of influencers and the people that they keep in contact with on social networking sites, indicating that the two actually may be mutually reinforcing.

There are lots of interesting insights and conclusions in this study.  Another one I like is the finding that internet users are more likely to frequent public places, contradicting the view that internet users tend to “cocoon” themselves away.

If you have a few moments, have a look at this study and let us know what you think.   Do these results ring true in terms of your personal experience and that of your family, friends or colleagues?   And maybe more importantly what can we learn from these findings?   I am especially interested in the potential implications for local community groups and whether the internet and mobile phones might actually provide a means to reinvigorate people’s participation in these groups.

TOP THREE BENEFITS

• Connect with family and friends
• Creating greater workplace flexibility
• Greater overall convenience

TOP THREE ANNOYANCES

• Difficult to separate work and leisure
• Social technologies are highly addictive
• Lack of etiquette – (transparency and respect)