ABSTRACT
If humanity entered the twentieth century hoping technology would reduce labor’s toil, increase leisure, and make life easier, by the century’s close Western societies have seen quite different views prevail. More and more, people associate technology with feelings of entanglement, stress, obsolescence, and powerlessness before the sweeping tides of innovation. “I have to take this call”: mobile phones and PDAs give us spatial and temporal freedom from the workplace but ensnare us in 24/7 work. “My computer is so slow”: enchanted by the promise of steady technological advances, we unquestioningly accept our ‘need’ for improved models, software upgrades, and new devices. “Let’s just get take-out”: fast food, ready-made meals, and (for the well-to-do) personal chefs help households shorten their dinner time or give up on it altogether in order to satisfy their incompatible schedules. Technologies intended to simplify our lives often complicate them in surprising ways, as anthropologists (Darrah, Freeman, and English-Lueck 2007) witnessed in the high-and low-tech ‘solutions’ that working mother Suzanne Jones employed to manage her family’s busy schedules:
By creating an infrastructure of devices to keep track, Suzanne ironically created the work of keeping track of how that infrastructure was used. She kept track of people and activities using a paper annual calendar posted on the refrigerator, a thick paper date book that she carried to work, and a PDA that contained her daily list. She transferred information from the PDA to a slip of paper to use while running errands, and she also used scraps of paper and Post-Its to record notes that she later entered in one of her formal calendars. Suzanne wanted to consolidate lists and calendars but said this would be difficult. She shared the refrigerator calendar with [husband] Humberto; its very conspicuousness guaranteed that she would not overlook a critical deadline or event. While the PDA consolidated
her “to do” list with other information, such as a calendar and address book, it did not allow her to view how an event fitted into longer units of time, such as weeks or months, thus making it difficult for her to plan. She found the PDA cumbersome to use while dashing between errands; that was why she kept the paper version perched on the dashboard. Because she job shared and divided her week between paid employment and family-related activities, Suzanne also manipulated lists and calendars to differentiate and integrate those domains of her life. For example, she kept extensive work-related information on the PDA, which she filtered from the “to do” lists of family-related errands: “I don’t want that invading what my primary goal is.”
