ABSTRACT
The ‘Second Machine Age’, as Brynjolfsson and McAfee call this digital revolution,2 brings with it great benefits but also costs. In The Digital Workplace: How technology is liberating work, I wrote about the challenges of workplace isolation that can be caused by the ‘work anywhere’ capabilities of an advanced digital workplace. IBM became known as ‘I’m By Myself’ after a decade of ‘home office working’.3 I also wrote about the addiction we are seeing due to the ‘work anytime’ options the digital world of work enables. In the two years since that book was published, isolation and addiction have come to be viewed as two core consequences of the digital age – part of the emerging range of ‘prices we pay’ for the liberation the digital workplace brings.
