We worry that IM, texting, Facebook are spoiling human intimacy, but Stefana Broadbent’s research shows how communication tech is capable of cultivating deeper relationships, bringing love across barriers like distance and workplace rules. The following video from TED.com (filmed in Oxford in July 2009) raises some really obvious yet compelling arguments about the way in which we as people naturally integrate our personal and professional worlds using technology.

Stefana argues that it is only in the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution that we have opted to keep our work/life socialisation distinct from each other: i.e. time to work vs. time to socialise.

Warren Myer from Redbubble.com makes this interesting observation on TED’s comment page:

“I think the point here is that the technology should not be self limiting. In that, yes there are dangers, but don’t legslate the dangers. Legislate the developers to improve the technology to either withstand those dangers or burrow straight through them.”

Stefana Broadbent, a cognitive scientist, has spent decades observing people as they use technology, both at home and in complex workspaces such as air-traffic control towers. She looks at the way we use our brand-new tools, and at the evolving practices for each tool (for instance, you might phone your mother, but text your spouse; IM with a co-worker, but tweet among friends) that speak volumes on the way we think about our relationships.

Using traditional and evolving ethnographic practices in her work, most recently for Swisscom and now as a Fellow at the new Digital Anthropology department at University College in London, she has made some surprising findings. Did you know, for instance, that many of us now write to our friends more often than we talk to them? Or that even the most hardened road warriors prefer to do “real”work at their own desks?

If you are unable to view the video above, click here to go directly to the TED site.