This is not to deny the distinctive materiality of digital technologies and its powerful efect on organizational practices. The speed of e-mail, for example, promotes constant connectivity and instant response. This technical afordance has agency in that it contributes to the naturalization or taken-for-grantedness of this practice.
It is precisely because of this that there is a tendency among advocates of shorter working hours to presume that quality personal time entails escape from the encroachment of electronic paraphernalia. But in my view, digitalization provokes a radical rethinking of the standard terms of the work-life balance debate, which pitches work against life and public against private. ICTs make possible new combinations of previously distinct temporal zones, new forms of mediated intimacy, and new ways of doing family. Mediated relationships have not supplanted embodied mutual presence, but rather exist alongside them. The phenomenological experience of being in the presence of others at a distance can invigorate and intensify communication, rather than detract from it. Contrary to much of the hype, we may well have more time to talk.
Digital technologies, then, must be understood as more than simply tools for exchanging data and coordinating human interaction. They do not just make existing forms of social action more eficient. As material objects or sociotechnical assemblages, they reconfigure the temporal and spatial dynamics of how people think and act. People may welcome the permeability of these boundaries for the flexibility and control it ofers rather than primarily fearing work intrusion into leisure time.
The important questions for a politics of time, in our age, might have less to do with a sense of harriedness or the mixture of work and home life than with a hierarchal time culture in which status and pay measure the value of a person’s time. Being busy is valorized, while having too much time on one’s hands signifies failure. Temporal disparities are closely mapped to social inequalities, as exemplified by the demonization of the unemployed. The democratization of time would lead to a very diferent social order, one in which time priorities and restraints are equitably shouldered. I would not be the first to suggest that “the concept that everyone’s time is equally valuable is truly revolutionary.”10
Chapter seven
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