I WAS just approaching the stop street when a man came barrelling around the corner, slewing across my lane so far that I skidded as I slammed on the brakes and bit my lip.
As he sailed past my squealing vehicle, I caught a glimpse: of course. He was on the cellphone.
By all that’s holy, aren’t any of these people on Facebook or Twitter? Surely they must have seen the ‘Close to Home’ ad that’s gone viral showing what can happen with a split-second of cellphone distraction while driving?
I am sure he would have argued that it couldn’t wait, that he was making a sale/fighting a fire/fixing a problem at work. Add one more cost to the way we do business these days.
I’m not a Luddite. (Even the Luddites were not Luddites, actually: “…the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new.”)
I love what new technology enables me to do – the research capabilities alone way outstrip anything a freelance journalist could do 20 years ago. But any great change involves simultaneous blessings and curses.
One curse is already a truism: you’re always on, now. There’s no such thing as nine-to-five any more; now the bosses “use your mind, but you never get the credit/it’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it”, 24/7. Evenings, weekends – the pressure is on to be available all the time.
But there’s another angle – we’re all doing more and more work that used to be done by other people.
My first encounter with the idea of ‘shadow work’ – as Dr Craig Lambert calls it – came via my profession. Journalists have suffered a kind of creeping increase in work load for some time now. You don’t just grab your notebook and pen and go out to do a story any more; you have to take the pictures, roll the video camera, think about your blog, vlog, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram while asking the right questions and trying to get to grips with the narrative of the story and the hidden angles.
And of course, technology makes all of this possible. You can use one device to record sound and vid, take still shots and make notes for yourself. The software makes it possible for even rank amateurs to take a decent pic, for example, and quality improves virtually by the month.
Just how much pressure can one person take?
Two things about this bother me: first, how much of this kind of pressure can one person take – and still find the time and brainpower to take it all in and notice the lies and subterfuges, or make connections between vastly different fields - the special skills that enable so much vital watchdogging journalism?
And second, what happened to the people who used to support the journo with the notebook, like the telex operator for one?
In his book 'Shadow Work: the unpaid, unseen jobs that fill your day', Lambert (who used to be a journalist himself) writes about all the jobs that have crept up on us, that we now do ourselves on behalf of businesses and organisations. We do our own correspondence by email and set up our own appointments.
We make travel reservations online, we bank online instead of with a teller, we don’t talk to a salesperson but spend hours researching products and prices online ourselves. When the cashier scans our purchases at the till, the technology does the job of stock-taking that used to be done dustily by hand once a year.
Face-to-face customer service has morphed into customer disservice outsourced to India and other far-flung places (a call centre is a ‘queuing network’, they tell us, and boy, do you queue!).
The impact shows perfectly in an example from the teaching profession in Ireland, where apparently middle management has been cut, so now teachers have been loaded with the admin work they used to do.
This looks good on the school system’s bottom line, of course; but the real cost is that some people are working harder and longer hours, while others are out looking for work. The admin burden has also increased because of a demand for more paperwork, more forms, more info – technology makes that possible too. The more data, the merrier – the computer can handle it, but can the teachers?
We don’t want to regress, of course; I would resist, kicking and screaming, if you tried to take my Google away from me. But I believe we need to face up to the unintended consequences of the huge change we’re undergoing. (It goes way further than work stuff – I could tell you about middle-class child tech users who lack the manual dexterity to handle scissors, for instance, and much more.)
And we need to take actions to counter them. For example, employers should put in place and enforce rules about intruding on employees’ personal time, to prevent over-stressed and health-compromised staff.
We’re bright enough to create the technology; surely we can box clever about the social impacts thereof?
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.