There’s a great interview with LSE sociologist Judy Wajcman about her latest book, Pressed for Time:
I have been skeptical about the story that acceleration is a purely technological phenomenon and that we are passive victims of technology. I wanted to stress the fact that technology is fundamentally social: it only makes sense once we give it meaning and incorporate it into our lives.
Her book makes the case that we need to look more closely at how time-saving technologies are really used in the workplace, and how we use the time that’s supposedly saved, in order to understand what impact they really have— and to understand why many technologies just make us feel like life is going faster, not that we’re more productive.
She offers the example of how washing machines have made it easier to wash any specific item of clothing, but made the clothes-washing process more complicated:
Decades ago I wrote a piece about house labor and the fact that domestic appliances and technologies such as the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and so forth, were not the answer to the problem of the division of domestic labor between men and women. I started to collect data based on time-use surveys and found that appliances raise expectations: you get a washing machine and suddenly you are expected to wash your clothes very often, and to arrange them into “bright colors” and “dark colors.” This affects not only the weekly time dedicated to laundry, but also the clothes you buy, the interior design of your suburban house, and many other aspects of your daily life. There is no simple equation between having a washing machine and spending less time on laundry; often, it’s the other way around.
Likewise, you could make the case that technologies like email reduce the amount of work necessary to communicate a message, BUT…. What this misses is that
- It raises the odds that you’ll have to write and answer a lot more mail than in the past.
- Because the apparent costs of of communication are lowered, the triviality of messages goes up: people are more likely to ask for status updates, send 43 reply-alls about a 10-minute meeting, etc.
- The labor that’s being “saved” by email isn’t the author’s labor. Instead, when you send an email rather than a memo, you’re cutting out the work of secretaries, office delivery boys, and whoever ran the mailroom or sorting facilities where interoffice memos went. This means ultimately that other kinds of work are likely to fall back on you— support stuff like trip planning, for example, that a good secretary really knew how to do well, but which now involves you struggling to figure out options on Expedia.
- There are real costs in terms of time and energy that get obscured.
There’s also this great observation:
I interviewed senior men managers and CEOs. They all talked about how much they regretted not having spent more time with their loved ones. But none of them turned around and said, “We’re going to reorganize the company so that the young men who come in won’t make this same mistake.” Instead it was what I call “a rhetoric of regret,” and it’s completely empty. Tech companies suck employees into an impossible work schedule and then they offer them yoga or mindfulness retreats—very different than actually reducing work hours or giving workers more free time.