Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

Several authors have attempted to specify the distinctive temporal consciousness that characterizes caring. Such discussions emphasize that the dominant mode of temporality in modern industrial society, standard linear clock time, represents only one of many diferent tempos people inhabit. While abstract labor time is a medium of market exchange that can be bought and sold as a commodity, the more fluid open-ended times of the private sphere are harder to measure. “The expenditure of time in diferent economic spheres or social relationships may well be incommensurable. It is certainly not homogenous; nor can it be straightforwardly converted or “clocked” since there is no common external standard for conversion, other than clock time itself.” Attempting to do this, argues Miriam Glucksmann, would be to confuse the measuring instrument with what it is intended to measure.31

Feminist theory draws attention to the embedded character of women’s time. For example, Karen Davies introduces the concept of process time to describe the plural, relational, and context-linked nature of the time that caring for others involves. According to her, there is a clash between nurturing rationality rooted in the process time that good care requires and the technical-administrative rationality of workplace organizations.32 Barbara Adam also stresses that, while both men and women are caught up in multiple times, time is not gender-neutral and many women’s times are constituted in the shadow of the market economy. Caring tasks are often cyclical, fragmented, and woven into other processes rather than being completed as discrete tasks that can be accomplished.

While some early critics, such as Julia Kristeva, endorsed a dualistic opposition between female and male time, contemporary analyses maintain that “women’s socially ascribed caring roles and, to a lesser extent, their physical role as reproducers, are linked to a range of temporal perceptions and logics very diferent from those that drive the labour market.”33 In this limited sense, it is meaningful to talk about women’s time. As Valerie Bryson argues in her book Gender and the Politics of Time, we need to recognize temporal rhythms outside the commodified clock time of the capitalist economy in order to value time spent caring for others as an important economic and civic activity.

Chapter five

128

A gender perspective highlights how diferent kinds of tasks require diferent qualities of time and that speed, and the technologies that enable speed, may not enhance the relationship between the time spent and the activity. For instance, giving and receiving care involves slowness: “being there,” as well as the emotional, afective dimensions of time. The politics of time goes beyond the redistribution of paid and unpaid work to include having time for ourselves as well as for others. More troubling for this literature on gender and time, it also asks us to rethink the relationship between care and work by foregrounding the pressures involved in straddling the multiple, contradictory temporalities of the public and private realm. The home is a domain where one ought to be able to regulate one’s own time with a latitude rarely ofered in the workplace. But is there something about the temporal modalities involved in family life that makes it especially hard to save time through automation?

Smart Houses and Caring Machines

A recurring theme of this chapter is the long-standing promise that domestic technology is the solution to the problem of housework. As with other forms of production, the future is projected in terms of automation eliminating the need for heavy and time-consuming labor. What hope is there that the smart house will finally deliver us from household drudgery? And will software agents or afective robots free us from some of the caring that slows us down?

Certainly the technological argument has intuitive appeal with regard to routine, repetitive tasks. Over the last decade, there have been a number of smart house and digital home installations and experiments in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and Asia.

Yet prototypes of the intelligent house tend to ignore the whole range of functions that come under the umbrella of housework. Magazines like Wired and science fiction films like The Matrix present ubiquitous computing as the backbone infrastructure of the twenty-first-century lifestyle. Home informatics, much hyped as the Internet of Things, is mainly concerned with the centralized control of heating, lighting, security, information, entertainment, and energy consumption. My suspicion that designers and producers of the technological home have little interest in housework is confirmed by depictions of the MIT Media Lab’s “CityHome,” with its moving walls that enable the transformation of your bedroom into a gym.

Doing Domestic Time

129

With few exceptions, these visions of domestic life celebrate technology and its transformative power at the expense of home as a lived and living practice. The target consumer is implicitly the technically interested and entertainment-oriented male, someone tellingly in the designer’s own image. The smart house they envision is more like Le Corbusier’s “machine for living” than a home.

The range of smart appliances featured in the annual International Consumer Electronics Show reflects the attempt to find home applications for the functions that computers have excelled at in business and scientific settings—information processing and cataloging numerical processes. LG Electronics, for example, is developing a refrigerator that allows consumers to scan a grocery receipt with their smartphones so the refrigerator can track what is inside. So if you buy some chicken, for instance, the refrigerator will keep tabs on when you bought it and tell you when it is about to expire. If you have chicken, broccoli, and lemons in your refrigerator, it will ofer recipes that include those three ingredients, even selecting recipes based on specific dietary needs and goals. Several manufacturers are introducing washers and dryers equipped with wi-fi that alert consumers on their television or smartphone when a load is done and gives them the option of flufing the towels for another ten minutes. There is also a robotic vacuum cleaner with a built-in camera that can be operated remotely so that its owner can secretly watch what the nanny is doing.

Manufacturers’ claims that this technological wizardry will make consumers’ lives easier are hard to verify. While there is a market for smart technologies like the Roomba vacuum cleaner, for example, the variety and complexities of household labor impose limits on its mechanization. Even in the diferently ordered world of paid work, robots perform only routine tasks in manufacturing, and much personal service work has proved impossible to automate. Domestic spaces are subject to a quite diferent set of considerations than those that govern the ofices, factory floors, and workplaces within which information technologies have conventionally been deployed. While the dominant logic of capitalist workplaces is that of eficiency and profitability, a diferent logic governs domestic life—one that is primarily emotional and moral rather than quantitative.

Chapter five

130

It is surprising how socially conservative are the aspirations betrayed by the templates for the digital house of the future. The home of tomorrow is in fact an old idea and, like much science fiction, tells us more about our conceptions of the present than it does about likely futures. The most visionary futurists have us living in households that, in social rather than technological terms, resemble the idealized single-family household. The fact that “the world’s 1.6 billion homes are as diferent from one another as the countries and cultures within which they were built” is at odds with the current, deceptively simple visions of the digital home.34 The messiness of daily life is replaced with a vision of technological order. The space-age design efort is directed to a technological fix rather than engineering a less gendered allocation of housework and a better balance between working time and family time. The wired house may have much to ofer, but democracy in the kitchen is not part of the package.

While automating routine housework is rarely the focus of technoscience, there is a vast research efort dedicated to computer software agents and robotics, no doubt because of their military applications. Nursebots, for example, are currently being developed for the commercial sector, for use in residential nursing homes for the elderly. However, as with other technologies, they are bound to be adapted and marketed for the home. So will these “caring” machines alleviate time pressure?

This again raises the issue of the multiple temporalities involved in caring. Nursebots, or mobile robotic assistants, can help to provide care for the elderly. They potentially ofer assistance to escort people walking for exercise or to attend meals. These tasks are extremely timeconsuming, because old people generally move at a very slow pace. Computers can also help monitor life signs and provide reminders regarding medication. Indeed, telemedicine is fast developing as a strategy for saving time and money in health services in the United States and Europe. However, many of the physical tasks that nursebots can perform simultaneously provide an opportunity for social interaction. When the “dead labor” embodied in machines is substituted for living labor, this opportunity is stripped away.

Doing Domestic Time

131

No longer. Computer scientists have been working on endowing robots with artificial intelligence for several decades. The field known as “afective computing” is extending this project to encompass emotional intelligence. The aim is for computers to be able to simulate emotions and feelings, to behave as if they have emotions. To this end, for example, a nursebot named “Flo” developed at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Labs was given basic facial features so that it could take an anthropomorphic form. Sociable robots in the form of Tamagotchi pets are commonplace in Japan. Indeed, Japan is in the forefront of care automation because it has an aging population and is a society with strong political resistance to immigration as a source of cheap domestic labor. (It should be noted that this project remains an aspiration of roboticists and their funders, rather than working technologies, as machines are yet to deliver the most basic forms of practical care.)

While innovations in robotics may well succeed in saving time, there are some who believe that it comes at too high a price. Sherry Turkle, who has written eloquently over many years about the creative potential of human-machine interaction, is worried.35 Her book Alone Together sees humanity as nearing a “robotic moment” in which robots will be employed in caring roles, entertaining children or nursing the elderly, filling gaps in the social fabric left where the threads of community have frayed.

Human susceptibility to developing feelings of attachment to machines is a longstanding preoccupation of Turkle. Her studies of children and the elderly interacting with robots that imitate living companions reveal that, universally, a bond is formed. The Furby exerts a hold over anyone who nurtures it for a few weeks. More sophisticated models provoke deep emotional connections. Scientists developing the latest robots report feelings of pseudo-parental attachment. They hate leaving the machines “alone” in empty laboratories at night. “People attribute personality traits and gender to computers and even adjust their responses to avoid hurting the machines’ ‘feelings.’”36 The extraordinary capacity people have for projecting human traits on to inanimate objects has been at the core of her writing. Now she is at pains to warn us that this intense relationship cannot be reciprocated. We are in danger of conflating caring as a behavior with caring as a feeling—machines can take care of us, but do not care about us.

Chapter five

132

While Japanese promotional material portrays the substitution of robotics for babysitting and housework as freeing up time to restore sociability, Turkle argues that the opposite is the case. She regards it as an irony that robots are being latched onto as the cure for a population increasingly isolated through the networked life. That is, our addictive immersion in digital connectivity means that time saved by robots will be spent plugged into the Internet and the mobile phone. Her view rests on the conviction that mobile phones, texting, and e-mail are creating a solipsistic universe; people are turning away from their family to focus attention on their screens. As I will demonstrate in the next chapter, this is a one-sided view of our relationship with technology in which we are being duped into increased dependency. Although this view has considerable currency, I argue that it fails to recognize the positive potential for cultivating a range of afective interactions between humans and machines.

Conclusion

This chapter has investigated why there is no simple connection between technology and time spent on housework. While domestic technologies have dramatically transformed our daily lives, they have not met the challenge of keeping home. Indeed, to take the example of the washing machine, it is notable that over the twentieth century the rate of innovation of this product has been very slow. Routine housework is still timeconsuming and is still primarily performed by women; hence, solutions have been sought by buying in goods and services. Least amenable to automation is the temporality involved in sustaining the afective bonds of family life. Although, as we have seen, even these have been the target of robotics’ designers.

It is interesting to note by way of postscript that analogous arguments have been made about earlier periods. Economists have long pondered why it is that some technologies difuse at faster rates than others. Avner Ofer, for example, is puzzled by the counterintuitive finding that household goods that use time (such as radio and television) difused much more rapidly during the postwar years than appliances that save or optimize time (cookers, refrigerators and washing machines). Kitchen and laundry appliances lightened the drudgery of housework and contributed to its reduction, yet consumers gave higher priority to buying home entertainment technologies. His explanation for this “myopic choice” is in terms of people’s preference for enhancing the immediate quality of their discretionary time over increasing its quantity. Moreover, “unlike the main housework appliances, ‘time-users’ delivered satisfactions directly to all members of the household, men and children as well as women.”37 While the gendering of artifacts does not explicitly figure in his model of consumption, the assumption here is that time-saving technologies were relatively devalued by men who had more purchasing power within households.

Doing Domestic Time

133

Ofer’s main thesis, however, is that the time saved by one set of appliances was consumed by the other. Entertainment appliances now claim the single largest category of leisure time use in both the United States and Britain. It is as if time saved by domestic appliances is spent watching the television screen. He views this as a myopic allocation of time, as the more television one watches the less satisfying it becomes. Indeed, he opines that television viewing has expanded to the point where it gives little more satisfaction than housework. As we shall see, the substitution argument (that new activities directly take time from previous ones) is problematic, as is the neat divide between time-saving and time-using goods, such as television as a form of child-minding. But Ofer’s overarching concern with the link between declining subjective well-being and time engrossed in compulsive television viewing chimes with Turkle’s argument about our addiction to ICTs.

The extent to which our lives today are consumed by ICTs is without precedent, and will be the subject of the next chapter. I will argue that we need to move beyond such polarized views of the relationship between technologies and our experience of time. The theme running through this book is that there is no temporal logic inherent in technology so that even the same devices can have contradictory dynamics. We will see, for example, that mobile phones, widely blamed for accelerating the pace of life, play an important role in both maintaining sociability and providing a form of talk-based care. Contemporary communication may be highly mediated, but that does not necessarily mean that time spent communicating via these channels is of less quality or significance.

Chapter five

134

Doing Domestic Time

135

Chapter Six Time to Talk

Intimacy through Technology

People’s ecstasy concerning the triumphs of the telegraph and telephone often makes them overlook the fact that what really matters is the value of what one has to say, and that, compared with this, the speed or slowness of the means of communication is often a concern that could attain its present status only by usurpation.

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money

When Volkswagen announced that it would stop sending e-mails to employees after ofice hours, the Independent newspaper declared “victory for Volkswagen workers who just wanted to be left alone.”1 The article continued by emphasizing that the “tyranny of the out-of-hours e-mail from the boss has plagued workers the world over ever since the introduction of the BlackBerry. But now, after years of subjugation, one group of workers has struck a blow for freedom.”

That our private time is being encroached upon by ubiquitous connectivity is widely regarded as driving the frantic pace of modern life. There are plentiful discussions about the inexorable extension of working time, reflected in terms such as work-to-family spillover, the colonization of time, and the blurring, merging and morphing of work-life boundaries. While the idea that the preoccupations of work can “spill over” into nonwork life is familiar, the ease with which digital devices teleport work into spaces and times once reserved for personal life represent a qualitative shift in the dynamic. The potential for work to invade every nanosecond is said by some to spell the end of pure, uninterrupted leisure time.

137