the first time “Le Monde” wrote it

” See you tomorrow ?

– No, I’m telecommuting. ”

In the past year, who has not heard this exchange that has gone viral? Or one of its multiple variants: “I work at home”, “You can reach me at home”, and, more technocratic, “I am in distancing” ? In times of pandemic, teleworking is essential as a standard, an anti-Covid-19 panacea and a saw for government communication. “Teleworking will be generalized wherever possible”, prescribes Emmanuel Macron. “At least four days out of five teleworking”, adds Jean Castex, who sets the dosage.

To be or not to be teleworking. That is the question. It is evident today that it crosses all offices, and only offices, let us not forget, so much is this a metaphysical controversy of leather circles. In companies in the dematerialized economy, even employees have vanished. The hallways sound hollow, the premises look like model apartments, videoconferencing meetings are all about discussions between Houston and the Moon, a meeting at the coffee machine requires an agenda.

The age of telematics

Long before becoming an everyday obsession, the word surreptitiously arrived in the daily columns on December 13, 1979. Scribbled on a good old newspaper, it bursts into the last sentence of a dedicated article by Alain Faujas. to a technological innovation, telematics. The latter term was still nebulous at the time. It means, must explain the author, a “Coupling, through the telephone network, of computers that users can consult remotely through a television”.

The expression came out of a report made in January 1978 to President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing by a renowned senior official, Simon Nora, and a young 27-year-old enarque, major of the Leon-Blum promotion and geek before the hour, Alain Minc. Soberly baptized “The computerization of society”, this text passes today for one of the first attempts in France to think about the digital world. If he does not use the word “telework”, he already describes the reality of it.

Telematics ushered in the age of Minitel, the first terminals of which were tested in 1980, and launched on the market by the PTT in 1982. The concept contained applications that were still very vague. We simply sense that the massive transport of data by computer cables over long distances is fraught with practical upheavals. We vaguely smell the revolution in the making. “Let’s dream”, writes the author by imagining a CEO controlling his employees remotely from a computer terminal.

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