Community, technology, & work

I think this Amanda Marcotte piece is pretty interesting.  She touches on the idea of work and community and how the modern workplace has, until very recently, served to cut us off entirely from our loved ones during the day.  This, she asserts, was not always the case.  People used to come into more contact with their loved ones during the day in the past and this served to create a more organic, more humane work place.  She riffs off a TED talk by Stefana Broadbent (below) which talks about how modern communication technology has actually allowed people to regain some of this ability to communicate with loved ones during the work day.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open. 

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too.

This makes sense to me.  Then again, the average high school student in America spends five and a half hours a day in front of a screen, and there is little doubt in my mind that this sort of always-online-or-watching-tv culture is bad for society in the long run.  Nor is our increased sedentary lifestyle exactly beneficial to our societal health or temperament. 

That being said, I think the benefits of technology should not be overlooked either, and if new avenues of communication are allowing friends and loved ones to keep in touch more, that’s undeniably a very good thing.

I’ve always thought a more likely reason for our atomization was our car culture.  The ability for families to spread out over such long distances, and the need to drive to get anywhere at all have led to people living further and further apart from one another.  My mom had seven siblings other than herself, and each one lives in a different city now, with their own families.  Only one stayed in her home town.  This was unheard of a generation previously.  Now it is the status quo.  My family has chosen a different path, and has decided to stay in our home town where our families live so that our children will have deeper and stronger ties to their community than we did growing up. 

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general.  In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance.  Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.

Watch the TED talk after the leap.