Blurring the Boundaries: Cell Phones, Mobility, and the Line between Work and Personal Life

meaning of places and locations--working with other employees at the office versus seeing family at home, for instance. They also reflect differentiation of the social meaning of time---the 9 to 5 workday versus the weekend. But today, wireless technologies, which help people cross space, time, activity and social networks, promise to bring us back to earlier times when the boundary between work and personal life was less distinct and to influence the meaning of space and time. This change is somewhat of a paradox, however, as wireless technology also will take us further afield, as it increases our temporal and spatial mobility. In this chapter, we discuss how this paradox is unfolding and draw on data from a field trial of digital cellular telephony to show some of the social implications for how we work and live. The social meaning and influence of settings Research in the tradition of "social ecology" (Barker, 1968) has shown that different settings for social behavior---offices