Social Control has come a long way, baby! In the days of yester-year working full time entailed a standard 9-5 discipline and if you were truly ambitious then perhaps even an 8-6 tenacity would be applicable. Of course, anyone who has worked full time knows that this is a laughably dated idea! If I had worked a 9-5 day I would have, with out a doubt, been fired. So how did this happen? When did we decide that work was far more important than friends, family, pets, exercise and hell, even siting in front of the T.V. scratching my butt?
The answer is, "we" didn't decide it, it was decided by the heads of industry that, to make more money, the worker bees needed to increase productivity.
The question is, how can that happen with minimal conflict? History has taught us that people can only be pushed so far before before they begin to unionize and make costly demands. How can we make people demand their own bondage? I know! Let's make the chains shiny, costly and we'll even link it personal status so people will spend their earnings on thier own enslavement! Enter the PDA! Imagine how wonderful your life could be if you were forever attached to everyone and everything! Think of how easy your life would be if your work could email you 18 times while you take a bath! How much more enjoyable would your kid's soccer game be if you could process spread sheets on the field?! You could work around the clock, it could be like you never left! Yeah!!!! Ulcers for everyone!!!!
Makes me think of two things. One is book Arlie Hochschild did a few years back about home/work balance that showed that much of people's social life had shifted to workplace -- a sort of voluntary recolonization. The Time Bind (2001).
ReplyDeleteSecond is interesting tension between PDA as tether and PDA as leash (not sure that's the right pair of metaphors -- we can work on that). Point is that these things allow us to roam and do other things rather than having to stay "in the office" or "tied to the desk" and they allow us to control how much we do synchronously and how much asynchronously and so on. Liberating, in a word. On the other hand, they allow us to be on call (and to put others "on call" : "where are you? what are you doing?") so much that our employers get to own (control) a bigger slice of our diurnal round. In a word, captivating?
I think there's some theoretically fertile ground in this dialectical pull of both/and.
And, as you note in your last lines, interesting emotional effects coming from structural stuff...
This is Fabulous!
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