Recognizing this seems to me to be a first step toward a fairer distribution of work.
Hectic Leisure in a Self-Service Economy
Up to this point, I have focused on the length of working hours. A related but even knottier issue is the tempo of activities themselves. I have already alluded to the intensification of work and the demands of multitasking required of today’s networked workers. But what about the acceleration of other aspects of our lives, such as the instantaneity of consumption and the intensity of leisure? If we had more time, how would we make the most of it?
Leisure time is sufused with ICTs, and I have talked about the trend toward multimodal connectivity and multiscreen viewing. The vast expansion of the market for consumer electronics, such as computers, cell phones, televisions, tablets, and MP3 players, is paired with an unprecedented speed of built-in obsolescence and product abandonment. We expect instant delivery of products of all kinds, and then discard them with equal speed, typically without a thought about the conditions of their production or the waste they leave behind. Indeed, one reason that time seems scarce is because it is impossible to consume the vast array of products and services on ofer. Whether or not we view human desires as inherently insatiable, contemporary consumer culture is certainly characterized by excess. Symptomatic of this is the endless upgrading of smartphones and a World Wide Web that can be surfed indefinitely.
One rarely noted way in which technologies consume time is that their rapid cycle of renewal requires an ongoing investment in skill acquisition. Familiarizing oneself with and learning how to operate digital devices requires substantial inputs of unpaid user time. Internet use, for example, requires an infrastructure and its maintenance. As the apocryphal story goes, if General Motors automobiles seized up as often as Bill Gates’s software, we would certainly not rate them. Our lower expectations of software have been well managed by marketing, so that we often blame ourselves for its deficiency. Even shopping online, which promises saving time, can be a tiring activity squeezed into time once reserved for rest and leisure. Automated telephone answering systems are the subject of many jokes that express our frustration at being at the mercy of a technology that is saving someone else’s time and money at our expense. Consumption in an instant society can, at times, involve a temporality of remarkable slowness.
Finding Time in a D igi tal Age
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