No Place Apart

It used to be that a person went to work, did his job, punched out, and came back home. Back in those days, work was work, and home was home. The distinction between work and home was obvious. Upon reaching home, the worker took off his factory clothes and put on his home attire. He stopped thinking about widgets and started thinking about what his wife was cooking for dinner. At home, there was no supervisor, no person telling him he needed to increase his productivity. Nor was there that guy down the line who always harassed him at lunch. Home was separate from work.

            Nowadays, the line between work and home has been almost completely erased. The worker comes home, checks her email, starts dinner, answers an email, takes a text from a co-worker, eats with the family (if she’s lucky) and then goes back to her computer. No longer just a body working an assembly line, the postmodern worker is engaged in managing projects and solving problems. In many ways, the employee in this New Economy seems more independent than her earlier industrial counterpart, but that’s not the whole story. She may have more control over her actions at work, but work itself seems to have more control over her life.

            If work used to be a place where we went to do a specific set of tasks, work now is an activity that can happen anywhere, at any time. Right now, for instance, I’m composing a column; an activity that I associate with my spare time. But if I get stuck and close this document and decide to check my email, there’s a very good chance that I’ll receive a message that will put me back at work. Even though I live more than twenty miles from Marlboro College, much of my time at home is owned by my employer.

            This blurring of boundaries is not necessarily a bad thing. I like the flexibility of working from home. I appreciate how email and on-line class forums have made it possible for me to stay in touch with my colleagues and students while still in my pajamas. But all this flexibility and mobile technology comes at a cost. I may be in my pj’s, but I’m never quite sure whether I’m ever at home. Being in my pj’s now can mean being on the job.  

            What adult workers are experiencing in the workplace, students seem to be experiencing with school. The preteen used to leave the classroom behind at the end of the school day. Once she stepped off the playground, the shy and awkward sixth grader could find some relief from the bullies. Even though the snide comments of the hallway might ring in her ears, the actual harassment was confined within the boundaries of the schoolyard. Now, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, the cruelties of the school arrive full force in her bedroom.  There is literally no place apart to take refuge.

            As various technologies erode the boundaries between school and home or work and home, it’s harder to question each sphere’s social norms. Students are always at school, workers are always at work, and home is a place where you get to wear your pj’s. If home is no longer a refuge from work or school, where does one go to create a different set of values? Where does one find the space to criticize the norms and habits that school and work demand? Without that critical space apart, it’s easy to believe that what you are at school or work is all you really are.

 When yet another student took his own life after being crushed on the Internet, a number of commentators interpreted the young suspects’ actions as evidence that this generation has lost touch with reality. One teacher, who posted a comment on a New York Times forum, described today’s students as “spend[ing] half the day texting their parents and the other half immersed in a world inhabited only by their peers.” According to this teacher, students today are stuck in a permanent state of childhood. “Their parents,” the post concluded, “with the help of technology, infantilize them until their late 20s.”

While it is easy to blame parents for the actions of their college-age students, I wonder whether the tragedy at Rutgers has more to do with the conditions of this New Economy. If home is no longer home and work is what we do whenever we aren’t sleeping, then there is no place to go to discover what it is we really want out of life. Life, in this New Economy, has been reduced to either school or work. When things go really bad in either one of those places, it’s hard to find reasons for sticking around. 

The answer to this problem isn’t more regulation or more avenues for prosecution but more differentiation. By traveling back and forth between the workplace and home, a worker (or a student) discovers things about herself that the logic of the workplace (or school) doesn’t recognize. The working wife who feels undervalued at home can point to the benefits she receives at work. The shy student who feels harassed at school can take some comfort knowing that at home she is secure.

In order for this to happen these spheres need to maintain more separation. Making a home requires much more intention than it did thirty years ago. It’s not enough to just put dinner on the table, although that’s a good start. We also need to shut off the multiple channels that threaten to turn home into work or school. Not because home is necessarily better, but because once we’ve lost home, we’ve lost a critical space. Without a place apart, it’s hard to challenge what goes on in those other spheres.