Essays

More work…?

If we have such an effective attentional filter, why can’t we filter out distractions better than we can? Why is information overload such a serious problem now?

For one thing, we’re doing more than ever before. The promise of a computerized society, we were told, was that it would relegate to machines all of the repetitive drudgery of work, allowing us humans to pursue loftier purposes and have more leisure time. It didn’t work out this way. Instead of more time, most of us have less. Companies large and small have off-loaded work onto the backs of consumers. Things that used to be done for us, as part of the value-added service of working with a company, we are now expected to do ourselves. With air travel, we’re now expected to complete our own reservations and check-ins, jobs that used to be done by airline employees or travel agents. At the grocery store, we’re expected to bag our own groceries and, in some supermarkets, to scan our own purchases. We pump our own gas at filling stations. Telephone operators used to look up numbers for us. Some companies no longer send out bills for their services — we’re expected to log in to their website, access our account, retrieve our bill, and initiate an electronic payment; in effect, do the job of the company for them. Collectively, this is known as shadow work — it represents a kind of parallel, shadow economy in which a lot of the service we expect from companies has been transferred to the consumer. Each of us is doing the work of others and not getting paid for it. It is responsible for taking a great deal of the leisure time we thought we would all have in the twenty-first century. (Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind)

OrganizedMindI initially excerpted this passage here to agree with it, but by the time I’ve finished typing it out, I find more areas of disagreement than agreement.

For one thing, the whole passage is overstated. “More [work] than ever before.” Seriously? More than settlers who had to hunt and dress game, clear fields, tend livestock and gardens, wash clothes by hand, deliver their babies and remedy their own illnesses, and build their homes? Does accessing my account online — a process that takes well under five minutes — even compare?

And for each of these fairly trivial tasks we may now need to do ourselves, others are released: balancing the checkbook, calling or driving to the travel agent’s office, writing out checks and envelopes and buying stamps to pay the bills vs. paying online or via automatic deduction. I suspect the net result is that we’re doing less than ever before — certainly not more.

Are we really “expected to” bag our own groceries and pump our own gas? We have these options but are not forced to choose them.

There is an implicit snobbery in the passage as well. “Each of us is doing the work of others and not getting paid for it.” Who defines which kinds of drudgery we’re entitled to think of as “the work of others”?

The “shadow work” the author complains that we should expect from companies is transferred to us because the companies themselves, in many cases, are leaner in their use of human labor, thanks to the increasing automation of the workplace. This is something that Nicholas Carr writes about in The Glass Cage, and he’s rightly troubled. The possibilities for job creation are shrinking dramatically because machines are, even considering the initial expenditure of implementing them, cheaper than people. But in any case, automation explains the increase of “shadow work.”

I find this passage less compelling than I did at first reading. But nevertheless, the reason I perked up my ears was the sense that we are increasingly “busy,” and seem to have less to show for it. I’m interested in exploring why this is, and I think this book may have something worth hearing on the subject before I’m finished with it. It’s certainly gotten my attention in its summary of the increase of information, and the stress our daily decision-making load puts on our attentional faculties. It could help to explain the fatigue I’ve become aware of in myself — part of the reason my reading has dwindled so much, and this blog has been so silent for so long.