Chapter 5 looks at how households allocate time to unpaid domestic work. Overall, time-use surveys show significant gender diferences in the amount of time spent and the type of activities performed. While fathers are doing more and women are doing less than they were, women’s labor still accounts for over two-thirds of the total time devoted to unpaid work. Is technology the solution? Will the digital home of the future finally free us from time-consuming drudgery?
This chapter will consider why “time saving” domestic technologies, such as washing machines and microwave ovens, have been surprisingly unsuccessful in lessening the domestic load. It turns out that the efect of technology has been peripheral because of changed expectations about child care, the emergence of new standards and tasks, and the durable connection of domestic activities with masculine and feminine identities. Finally, I examine the cultural imaginaries around smart houses and “caring” robots, showing how they reflect the ethos of their designers.
As well as being the site of housework, the domestic sphere is associated with personal relationships and intimacy. How communication technologies afect these dynamics is the theme of chapter 6. I begin by describing the saturation of everyday life by media technologies, for example, how people are meshing multiple devices. I then present some of my own research on the mobile phone’s role in shifting the boundaries between work and home. The main use of the mobile phone turns out to be social, with much value placed on the enhanced ability to microcoordinate the timing of complex family activities. In this way, I argue, mobile phones have become a new tool for intimacy.
More broadly, I consider the efect of the machine-mediated nature of social relationships. The significance of the move from mass communication, such as television and radio, to individual, privatized communication on personal digital devices is contentious. Opinions tend to be polarized between those who stress the new freedoms and increased individual autonomy enabled by these technologies and those who foresee a world of constant connectivity but less meaningful communication. A false dichotomy has developed between direct and mediated communication, positing them as alternatives. I argue, instead, that we need to think about the ways in which communication and afect are embedded in material objects.
Introduction
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