It's getting harder to get away from it all

Having just come back from two weeks away from the office, during which time I had no access to email or voicemail, I can testify to the regenerative effects of a proper holiday. It always puzzles me that there are people out there who can’t appreciate this. You can see them at every holiday resort, checking their emails and text messages, barking instructions down their mobiles and occasionally settling down with a two-day-old copy of the Financial Times for a good read.

And for those of us who find the sight of people working while on holiday rather unsettling, things are only going to get worse. It seems the unified communications (UC) industry has perfected a feature guaranteed to appeal to these Club Med drones: presence. This slave-driving application can be set up to always allow messages or calls to get through to the user no matter where on earth he or she happens to be.

Proponents of presence say that if a user doesn’t want to be contacted, all they have to do is turn their device off or, as one told me, “run the ‘not available at this time’ flag up the flagpole”. Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a presence app if users kept doing that.

So how long will it be before presence apps are mainstream? Well, not that long, judging from a recent survey by research firm Datamonitor. This asked 390 IT managers from around the world how long they thought it would be before certain network technologies were mature enough for routine use. Just over 40 per cent said presence applications would be routinely used within two years, compared with just under 40 percent who said use of massively hyped voice-over-IP systems would be widespread within the same timeframe.

But will this technology really catch on so quickly? Suppliers of presence software are keen to point out how their products can make us all more productive. I’ve got nothing against technologies that can increase workplace efficiency, but if the price of this extra productivity is that workers have to accept that they must be contactable anytime, anywhere, I can see a backlash on the horizon.

Then again, maybe I’m overestimating the potential for resistance. Most people admit to feeling a little stressed when they find they have gone out without their mobile phone. Anybody with experience of drug dependency would recognise the symptoms. Indeed, so hooked are we to our mobiles, we may be on the verge of identifying a new species of the Homo genus: Homo Mobile Addicticus. Viewed in evolutionary terms, presence apps could well be the next big thing, and people like me may one day go the way of the dodo.