You address triviality (Farmville) in work place.
The question, I think, was the other way around: The work (work email) in triviality place (diner room with spouse) And the Last psychiatrist got something when he pretend it's because we do not want to be "just" a spouse, we need to show off as a "worker". And not because we like work, or because as an ethic of work like you said (it must be partially true of course); But because being a spouse is plain boring. He went even further as explaining that before the internet, being a spouse was already unbearable so we used small talk to get through it. Which somehow get along well with Methland argument for triviality in work : What were we doing in workplace before Farmville? Painting nail, playing room golf. We must notice that the open-space came at the same time as the internet; With internet we can hide our triviality in open-space. The point being, either at work or in the diner room, we cannot be the one thing society ask us to be : A pure worker, or a pure family member. We need to mix thing up to feed the illusion that we are something bigger, less boring. I cant help but think there something really true here. And it never was -as Randi Z. Pretend- about protecting the family space from the work shore. It's about surviving the boredom of family place with anything else: work is fine because it is valued by society.
A few things: 1) The Open Office was invented by Robert Probst, CEO of Herman Miller, in 1960. Herman Miller introduced the Action Office in 1964 and published the concepts in his book "The Office: A Facility Based on Change" in 1968. So really, open-space offices effectively predated The Internet (as far as the broader world was concerned) by 30+ years, or more than a generation of workers. 2) "Being a spouse is plain boring" doesn't have any basis in fact. Certainly, marital problems exist… but we haven't let work seep into our lives because work is somehow more interesting. A healthy work/home balance has been a cornerstone of industrial/commercial production since before Henry Ford - he placed a great premium on vacation and benefits so that his workers would be focused. The Last Psychiatrist uses "boring" in terms of "smalltalk is boring" not "marriage is boring" - extrapolating, a marriage that is already uninteresting is vulnerable to iPhone intrusions, not because the institution itself is flawed. 3) Prior to Farmville, people spent less time at work. The proliferation of time-wasters on the Internet is related to an increase of time spent away from leisure pursuits. I can find you graphs. 4) Society does not has not and never will ask you to be "a pure worker" or "a pure family member." Not even Lenin was into that. It does not explain the proliferation of work email at home.