Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

So what are the efects of the saturation of everyday life by instantaneous media?

The move to individualized, privatized communication on personal digital devices does mean that more and more of our social relationships are machine-mediated. Our personal time and private activities are punctuated—some say “perpetually disrupted”—by these communications. But interpretations vary between those who see this as increasing freedom and individual autonomy and those who fear a world of perpetual but less meaningful communication. Given how much of our lives is now spent on screens, is there still time to talk?

In chapter 4, I examined the impact of ICTs on the tempo of work at the workplace. In the first part of this chapter, I will focus on their role in redefining the boundaries between work and home and whether this is of more significance to feelings of harriedness than the pace of work itself. Taking issue with much of the literature in this area, I am going to argue against the view that ICTs extend and colonize all time outside the workplace.

In the second part of the chapter, I want to broaden the discussion beyond the all-too-familiar debates about the efect of ICTs on work-life balance. In my view, reframing such debates around the relationship between mediated communication and forms of close personal ties is a more productive way of thinking about these issues. This involves questioning the primacy typically accorded to direct, in-person interaction, which tends to obscure the role of material objects in the dynamics of afiliation. My own approach treats communication as embedded in various technologies that cannot be separated in terms of pure and mediated, with the former assumed to be more “real” than the latter. Digital devices can then be understood as fostering new patterns of social contact, providing a new tool for intimacy.

Multiple mediated forms of connection and distance, and the diferent negotiations that take place around access and availability do disrupt what we once thought of as boundaries between public and private, work and family, labor and leisure. However, rather than worrying about technology intruding on, and poaching, time from intimate moments that we used to think of as somehow “private,” we would be better of reformulating the question in terms of the control that individuals can and do exercise over when and where they make themselves available.

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I have been emphasizing throughout that time pressure is a multidimensional experience afected by a variety of factors. We have seen that economic imperatives, the rise of dual-earner families, and heightened expectations of parenting all accelerate our time frame. However, the temporal value of speed and eficiency and the desire to minimize the time in which a task is completed do not pervade every facet of our social and cultural life. While there is much emphasis on how technological devices accelerate activities and so crowd our time, I will argue that they can be allies in our quest for time control, preserving time as well as using it. The same features of ICTs that increase time pressure also ofer flexibility in the timing and allocation of activities, and can facilitate temporal coordination. By intensifying connections with family and friends, ICTs can support new forms of personal ties that combine intimacy and spatial distance in newly configured times.

Families without Borders: Mobile Phones, Connectedness, and Work-Home Divisions

The division between the public world of work and the private domestic sphere has often been claimed as a distinctive feature of modern society. Arising in the middle of the nineteenth century but probably most fully achieved in the drift to suburbia in the middle of the twentieth, private life became the centre of new, secularized forms of self-fulfillment.2 Postwar town planning reflected this, with cities and suburbs geographically segregated into zones for industrial and domestic use. Against this background, any threat to the inviolability of this personal realm is perceived as a risk to family balance, intimate relations, and personal identity.

So it is hardly surprising that the potential of digital technologies to dissolve the boundaries that once separated work and home life is the subject of much debate. Some sociologists even claim that “the distinction between public and private domains should be dispensed with since nothing much of contemporary social life remains on one side or the other of the divide.”3 Mobile phones are at the crux of these discussions, as they operate regardless of location, giving rise to a new pattern of continuous mediated interactions, variously known as constant touch, perpetual contact, absent presence, or connected relationships.4 Many critics stress that, by allowing employers to contact their employees at all hours, mobile technologies encourage work problems to colonize the times and spaces once reserved for family life. Others, however, argue that by making place irrelevant, these devices aford novel opportunities for intense connectedness, deepening strong ties.5 Rather than fragmenting relationships, time spent using communication tools might make relationships more durable.

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What is at stake here is the efect of mobile technologies on the social organization of time. From the twentieth century onward, the regulation of working time has been a major method of social coordination, underpinning the capacity of all individuals to participate in joint leisure and recreation. This was reflected, for example, in twentieth century broadcasting, whereby radio and television programming schedules were timed to coincide with what was assumed to be a mass audience at home in the evening after work. Although the idea of a “normal” nine-to-five job still has a heavy hold on us, it no longer reflects the great diversity of hours or places in which people work. With the rise of flexible working hours and the predominance of dual earner families, reconciling the temporal regimes of paid work, leisure and family life has become increasingly complicated.

In this context, the traditional landline telephone looks anachronistic. Originally designed as a business tool, its use accorded with the notion that people demarcated and controlled their time outside of the workplace. Before the emergence of wireless telephony, there were of necessity separate phone lines (with separate numbers) for business and home. While using the fixed telephone at work was seen as a significant aid to employees in managing family issues while at work, most employers would limit access to home telephone numbers to “emergency” or crisis situations.

Digital communication devices have changed all that, providing people with the means to break from the traditional demarcation of work time from home time. All the evidence suggests that ICTs are indeed being used across social domains to accomplish work.6 According to the Pew Internet survey, almost half (45 percent) of all working Americans report doing at least some work from home, although the segment that routinely works from home is smaller (18 percent). Checking workrelated e-mail on the weekend has become routine for over half of all workers, and around one-third check their e-mail on vacation. However, the likelihood varies greatly by type of worker. Whereas well over twothirds of those in the highest-earning occupations (earning more than \$75,000) report working from home some of the time, less than one-third of those in jobs earning less than \$30,000 a year do so. Those who own smartphones are much more likely to be required to read and respond to work-related e-mails when not at work.

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Predictably, most of the existing studies about work spilling over into family time take a management or organizational perspective. The assumption is that the dramatic increase in workers’ use of ICTs necessarily extends working time. For example, a Canadian study of managers, professionals, and technical workers actually defines cell phones, laptops, home computers, and BlackBerry devices as work extending technology— meaning the act of engaging in work-related activities outside of regular ofices hours in locations other than the business ofice.7 Some workers in this study, especially heavy BlackBerry users, did report a sense of having less family time as a result of working from home. Intriguingly, however, the main finding was that the very same features of ICTs that increase perceived control and facilitate communication are also the source of many oppressive features.

Noelle Chesley similarly found that frequent use of communication technologies by American professional and managerial career couples is linked to greater work-family permeability, lowering family satisfaction.8 However, work-family spillover was found more typically among men, and family-work spillover more among women, with only women reporting that taking family-related calls at work was stressful. In this way, Chesley argues, these technologies may be reinforcing the gendered character of work-family boundaries, as family responsibilities appear more likely to influence women’s outcomes. The potential for ICTs to simultaneously reinforce and rearticulate conventional gender scripts is a subject to which I will return.

The focus of these studies on high-earning employees bolsters the view that ICTs permit work extension, undermining domestic and family time. However, as I will demonstrate below, this is not necessarily indicative of more general societal trends in ICT usage.

A more fundamental problem, however, is that these studies take for granted the very boundary separation that they purport to be examining. The far-reaching changes wrought by digitalization call for a reexamination of this conceptual framework. Boundary permeability may not be the best way to frame the complex issues associated with a shifting workfamily interface. As people further incorporate ICTs into the fabric of their everyday lives, it may be that the spatial, organizational, and even psychological distinctiveness of time at home and time at work will lose its salience. We therefore need to stop focusing on the impact of new communication technologies on the boundaries themselves. Instead, I argue, the task is to comprehend the practical ways in which these devices facilitate idiosyncratic patterns of availability, such that individuals no longer recognize much of the divide between these categories in the first place.

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Much of the literature on spillover theory and work-life balance adopts a rather static model of the home as a fixed space in which family life is experienced and lived. By contrast, contemporary sociology of the family emphasizes relationships, connectedness, and practices. For example, David Morgan stresses that family life is always continuous with other areas of existence: “family practices are not necessarily practices which take place in time and space conventionally designated to do with ‘family,’ that is the home.”9 Rather, families are actively constructed through the day-to-day activities of their members, including in places of paid work. For Morgan, then, individuals are doing family, instead of passively residing within a pregiven structure. Family is designated less as a noun and more as a verb.10

The division between home and work, apparently so natural, is historically specific and built by social actors through repeated practices over time. Among these practices are those aimed at controlling the flow of information, communications, and demands across this boundary. The very concern about spillover and colonization signals the contested, changing nature of the public/private divide. These debates assume that mobile technologies inevitably produce workers, consumers and parents who are perpetually available. In the next section, I will start to show the limitations of such a view.

Patterns of Mobile Phone Use

To date, research on mobile phones has taken the form of either smallscale studies or surveys of attitudes toward the device.11 My own research, which was conducted over several years starting in 2007, is based on a nationally representative survey of Australian employees. It was designed to investigate how individuals and households use the mobile to negotiate the diferent dimensions of everyday life.12 The aim was not only to report on people’s perceptions of their phone use but also to collect objective data on their actual behavior and practices. In order to capture this, I utilized two supplementary instruments: a unique analysis of the logs of calls held on mobile handsets and a purpose-designed time diary recording why, when, how often, and in what context people use their mobiles. Taken together, this information sheds light on the question of whether mobile phones help or hinder individual eforts to manage work and family time.

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The common view, that the mobile phone promotes the colonization of personal time by job-related matters, is not supported by my findings. Indeed, major uses of the mobile, at any time of day, are not work related.

According to the nationwide survey, three-quarters of calls made on mobile devices and almost 90 percent of text messages are with workers’ family and friends. Similarly, for almost all of the twenty-one thousand calls retrieved from handset logs, the predominant purposes are social. Thus, 40 percent of all voice communications involves contacting family, while staying in touch with friends accounts for a further fifth of all calls made and retrieved. A strong social emphasis is also evident in text messaging, with family (35 percent) and friends (25 percent) accounting for the overwhelming proportion of text messages. Only 21 percent of calls are work related, with men more likely to use their mobile phone for this purpose.

That the mobile phone is, in practice, predominantly a device for personal communication rather than work extension is underscored by the timing of calls. Both the phone log and the diary data show that workrelated calls are mostly confined to standard business hours, rising sharply after 8 a.m. and declining around 5 p.m., with a small lunchtime dip. Importantly, work-related calls that could potentially extend work after hours (from 7 p.m. to midnight) constitute less than 3 percent of all the calls logged. Indeed, this low rate of work-related use out of standard hours suggests that something other than the mobile phone is extending work hours.13

Mobile phones, then, cannot be seen as primarily extending work and thereby fueling feelings of harriedness. On the contrary, by allowing some of the concerns of family and personal life to be handled during the working day, they might even be deployed to reduce time pressure. Over half of my survey respondents regard the mobile as helping them balance their family and working lives; very few report that it has a negative impact. When asked about the mobile’s significance for family and household coordination, great importance was attached to information about the timing of the arrival at home and arranging to meet with other family members. Among parents, roughly two-thirds rated “arranging to deliver children” and “finding out where children are” as important, while planning meals was mentioned by a third. This softening of schedules, as well as time shifting activities to dead time, ofsets—if not relieves—the extra time pressure created by potentially unlimited availability.

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Much has been made of the mobile phone’s role in micro-coordination,14 the way it ofers greater flexibility of schedules and control over timing, thereby saving time. Even making calls during dead time, which might sound like an escalation of the pace of events, might also relieve stress. The pattern reported above does indeed suggest that a major use of the mobile phone is for the temporal coordination of family afairs. Given the increasing complexity of managing the logistics of everyday life, the mobile phone may be the ideal tool for our contemporary times.

In a rare study, Emily Rose examines the specific ways in which employees engage in personal communication during the workday for these purposes. Instead of just noting the occurrence or not of such communication, she explores the intricate practices people devise in order to influence the extent and form of the connection between their work and personal lives.15

The mostly male engineers interviewed valued the ability to attend to matters that contributed to the organization of domestic life, as well as drawing on family and friends for personal and professional support. Equally though, they acknowledged that the unfettered flow of personal life into work was undesirable. Concerns included receiving unwanted communications and inappropriate messages and revealing too much of one’s personal life to colleagues.

As a result, the employees deployed a range of strategies in a bid to exploit the benefits of personal contact during the workday while minimizing the downsides. They did this by managing, restricting or otherwise controlling incoming personal phone calls, texts and e-mail. This was achieved largely by granting prospective interlocutors access via specific modes. Some of these modes, such as e-mail and SMS, were favored because of their asynchronous properties, granting the receiver much greater freedom regarding when they respond. Moreover, in open-plan ofices, the most discreet means of interacting typically is computerbased e-mail, whereby personal communication can be disguised as a work task.

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Overall, the study found that employees actively manage the degree to which ICTs allow their personal lives to enter the workplace. While they take advantage of the possibility of engaging in personal mediated communication, at the same time, they engage in multifaceted strategies to restrict such permeability. This results in individually nuanced interfaces through which people from workers’ personal lives have varying degrees of access to that worker. In this way, the engineers developed what might be thought of as a hierarchy of accessibility. While partners, close family members, and children are permitted to communicate by telephone (either landline or mobile), communication with friends is lower down the hierarchy, involving e-mail or texting. In other words, immediate access is denied to this group. Such research highlights the finely tuned ways in which workers utilize the materiality and functionality of technologies both to facilitate and impede contact with particular people at particular times.

In sum, fears that the constant availability aforded by mobile devices has accelerated the pace of life beyond people’s perceived capacity to cope comfortably are exaggerated. Using mobiles does not straightforwardly lead to an increased sense of being rushed or pressed for time. More frequent use does not even lead to the experience of harried leisure. Indeed, it seems that the “always-on” character of digital technologies provides new opportunities for flexible coordination, counterbalancing any uncomfortable increase in time pressure.

Networked Families

At one level, then, portable devices enable us to organize more flexibly and eficiently and thus save time overall. Indeed, for Rich Ling, the mobile phone has completed the automobile revolution. “Where the automobile allows flexible transportation, up until the rise of mobile telephony there has been no similar improvement in the real-time ability to coordinate movements. When you were en route, you were incommunicado. The mobile telephone completes the circle.”16 So, for example, by redirecting travel that has already begun, the mobile reduces transportation time. Harking back to Lewis Mumford’s famous line about the clock being “not merely a means of keeping track of hours, but of synchronizing actions,” Ling argues that the mobile phone now competes with or supplements the wristwatch as the ultimate technology of micro-coordination.17

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Throughout this book, however, I have been urging caution about making direct links between technological innovations and time saving. We have seen that there are many instances of artifacts, such as washing machines, that were supposed to save time. Evaluating such claims is always complex, as, to follow this example, people wash clothes more often. In other words, people commonly use technologies to enable them to achieve higher standards rather than to save time. There is a parallel with improvements in the speed of public transport. Many people have chosen to live further away from work as transport speed increased rather than to save time, so their commuting times stay the same.18 The equivalent in the case of the mobile phone is that we may use it not so much to save time as to achieve more communications.

Furthermore, an increase in the volume of communication may result in communications of a diferent order. I have been arguing that we need to think about digital devices as sociomaterial practices that coevolve with lives as lived in interaction with technologies. If the social and the technical are mutually shaped, then technical innovations can foster novel patterns of social interaction, altering the quality of the times and spaces people occupy. In other words, mobile phones may be ushering in a range of new communication patterns, social relationships, and corresponding forms of life. It is thus fruitful to reformulate our analysis of work-home permeability in terms of how people are enacting these varying temporalities, and doing family, with digital technologies.

In this vein, Christian Licoppe suggests that ICTs provide a continuous pattern of mediated interactions that combine into “connected relationships,” so that one can be present in time yet absent in the flesh. Rather than thinking about tasks and relationships as being located in one physical sphere or the other, he argues that new communication devices (such as the mobile phone) are not just added to other devices or substituted for rival uses. Instead, “it is the entire relational economy that is ‘reworked’ every time by the redistribution of the technological scene on which interpersonal sociability is played out.”19 Noting the frequency and short duration of mobile phone calls and mobile text messaging (in France), he argues that communication practices are being redirected toward connected interpersonal communication practices. Importantly, Licoppe stresses that this “connected” mode coexists with previous ways of managing “mediated” relationships, representing the emergence of a new repertoire for managing social relationships.

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If connected relationships blur the experience of absence and presence, then by implication they are disrupting and rearticulating the public and private spheres. Having examined the claim that ICTs extend our working time, I now want to interrogate the related claim that they intrude on our intimate and family-based communication time. In other words, does the constant connection aforded by mobile modalities transform the quality of personal relationships? After all, families remain a crucial relational entity playing a fundamental part in the intimate life and connections between individuals. And building and maintaining relationships does take time together. So does the fact that we spend almost half of our waking hours using media and communications technologies leave us less time to talk face-to-face?20

Hardly a month goes by in which there isn’t a new article or book on the subject of whether digital devices bring us together or push us apart. Just as in some early debates about the impact of television, many express the view that smartphones, tablets, and laptops are hollowing out our personal relationships and family time. In these scenarios, media use is portrayed as a replacement for, rather than a complement to, copresent family contact. For example, I have already mentioned Turkle’s well-known argument that ICTs dilute the quality of time families spend together because individual family members are glued to a screen instead of socializing with each other.21 Far from allowing us to communicate better, she views technology as isolating us in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the human world. Addicted to multitasking on their BlackBerries, parents do not give children their full attention, and teenagers have become scared of the immediacy of talking on the telephone.

While some of the initial research did suggest that the introduction of the web increased loneliness, there has since been a plethora of studies showing that heavy users tend to have more, not less, social contact.22 About half of British Internet users, for example, say that the Internet has increased the contact they have with friends and family.23 And rather than replacing other forms of interaction with family and friends, the Internet complements other forms of contact. Most people communicate with family and friends at least once a week. Their means of keeping in touch are, in order of importance, face-to-face visits (84 percent), text messages (62 percent), telephone calls (60 percent mobile; 48 percent landline) and e-mails (33 percent). Around a quarter of adults use instant messaging on a weekly basis, and around one-tenth use mail to keep in touch with friends and family.24

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