Yahoo and the big-city paradox

An interesting furore erupted this month following an order from the new chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, that employees accustomed to working from home would henceforth have to turn up at the office. The edict, unexceptional in many industries, scandalised many tech workers, for whom the freedom to work anywhere is an article of faith.

You can see why. Since the chief use of information technology is to free us from the constraints of place and time, what is the point of all this wizardry if people must still spend hours commuting to jobs they could do at home?

At the risk of sounding Marxist, I do think it is time for technology to benefit labour as well as capital. Research suggests that a typical employee works for an extra ten hours a month for no extra pay when given a work Blackberry (this is one of the reasons for the declining sales of newspapers — the time commuters once devoted to reading the paper is now spent sending emails). There has to be a trade-off somewhere, surely?

But at one level Yahoo is right. Nothing fully replaces face-to-face contact. And many of the most important interactions between employees are serendipitous. Electronic contact needs to be interspersed with personal contact. For this reason I strongly suspect the wider adoption of technologies such as videoconferencing will not diminish the demand for air travel, as many opponents of airport expansion suggest, but will in fact increase it. Videoconferencing and air travel should not be seen as mutually exclusive alternatives but as complementary goods. Once it becomes easy to do daily business with people everywhere, the need to visit those people will grow.

Predicting future work and travel patterns is of great importance to cities such as London.