I start this essay with a personal anecdote about working from home during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. By no means intended to be representative, I share my story with hopes of drawing out some insights about technology and the affective impact of “remote” work. Understanding the affective impact of remote work requires that we pay serious attention to our increasingly intimate relationships with technology and thus consider the socio-material or socio-aesthetic arrangements in which we increasingly find ourselves embedded. In using the terms socio-material or socio-aesthetic, I refer to the entanglement of social interactions and designed objects such as software and smartphones, but also the domestic and professional spaces in which remote work occurs.
Remote Work’s Intimacy
Beginning in March 2020, my partner and I began working from her home in Los Angeles. I set up shop in the “office,” one of the apartment’s three rooms. The office was a glorified storage closet with a desk, a tiny window, and the cat’s litter box tucked in a corner. Meanwhile, my partner worked from her dining table in the living room. As a senior director of an art gallery, she spent hours in Zoom meetings with artists, clients, her coworkers, and her boss—an experience she described as “the class disparity slideshow”—while sitting mere feet from the entryway, kitchen, and couch. The details of our private existence were difficult to shield, despite her endless contortions to attempt to present herself against a neutral, blank wall, while doing the important work of maintaining business connections—mediated, of course, by Zoom, her laptop, and phone. When she wasn’t in Zoom or deep in her email, she was talking on the phone or in a social media app trying to keep up with the art world’s shift to “virtual” events. Sometime after six or seven in the evening, she would close her laptop, remaining attached to her phone, often answering phone calls and emails from clients throughout the night. The same was true for me as I dealt with an endless stream of anxious emails from students. We took turns cooking dinner, an activity that concluded with us eating in the same place where she had been working all day.
After a month, she exclaimed, “I can’t handle everything happening in the same space! It just feels like one big undifferentiated thing! I need to set up a desk in the office.” She felt the absence of boundaries both physically (“the same space”) and aesthetically insofar as she worked from a place that felt wrong, like experiencing categorical error at the level of interior design (i.e., needing to set up a proper desk, not sit at a dining table). Moving to the office reestablished, for my partner, a physical and aesthetic demarcation of social spaces. We had one room to sleep in, one room to work in, and one room in which to eat, cook, watch television, and celebrate the year’s end.
Fifteen months later, I was using Microsoft Teams to attend a department meeting in the same room where I watched a Trumpist mob attack the U.S. Capitol and one room over from where I bore somber witness to 2020’s conclusion. Teams had just undergone a redesign, so I was finding it difficult to locate my yellow-gold digital hand to ask a question about our return to campus. Before I could overcome this design problem, my partner’s cat leapt onto my keyboard, arriving in my department meeting with a light thud. She weighs 11 pounds, having gained some weight just like her parents and so many other people during the pandemic.
“Oh! What’s the cat’s name?” asked my department head with a laugh and a smile. I tried to reach for my computer to unmute myself, but the cat hissed and raised one of her paws to me in preparation for what might surely be a fatal blow. Somehow, I managed to unmute myself unscathed. “Valentina,” I said, “her name is Valentina”—my face partially obscured by the perturbed kitty’s black-furred body as she flipped her tail in aggravation. This was one of the first days that my partner worked in a physical location that prohibited Valentina from sitting on her human mother’s lap. This made Valentina’s favorite resting spot—my partner’s lap—farther than three feet away from me and farther than two feet from Valentina’s litter box for the first time in over a year.
Like so many other remote workers, my partner and I shared an office; our bodies in space together (along with our cat) and in relation to technologies that made others interactionally present. Recognizing the relative privilege of having an entirely separate room in which to work, our remote workspace felt very intimate, nonetheless. My partner met with artists and art collectors while I taught courses, graded student work, read, wrote parts of my recent book and other manuscripts, and met with anxious students who were encountering their first global crisis. Valentina normally sat on my partner’s lap during what seemed (to me at least) to be an unending schedule of Zoom meetings and Google Hangouts. My video meetings took place in the same room, but in a slightly different interactional environment: Microsoft Teams. Fortunately, my meeting marathons came less frequently on the rare days when I decided to stack course meetings, office hours, union meetings, and department meetings like the one in which my colleagues got to meet my small, furry daughter.
Sensing Remoteness
Remote work is never really remote. Instead, it occurs up close and personal in rather intimate and complex entanglements of domesticity, industry, and technology. This entanglement draws our attention to a well-known finding from research on work in knowledge, information, cognitive, or creative industries: blurred lines between work and nonwork (Gregg 2011; Neff 2012; Sennett 2000; Wajcman 2015; Wajcman and Rose 2011). Still, the pandemic’s distinctive entanglements seem to raise this blurring to new extremes, not just in terms of overlapping temporalities, but in terms of overlapping and disjointed feelings or affects—those distinctive impingements upon our bodies that let us know when we are at work or at home, enjoying the pleasures of leisure or toiling in front of a screen.
My recent book, Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries (Columbia University Press, 2021), highlights how technologies, impinging upon our bodies’ senses, shape how work feels and how, at times, these sensual impingements nudge us toward organizational and managerial goals. As you can imagine, I’ve spent much time since March 2020 thinking about not just the economic impact of the pandemic for workers, but the affective impact of this new world of work ushered in by the pandemic, one firmly embedded in the above-described entanglement of technologies and intimate spaces—a heightened version of what Melissa Gregg calls “work’s intimacy.”
Class has been at the forefront of my thoughts as I’ve wondered why so many of my more privileged friends, family members, colleagues, and acquaintances, along with strangers who I witness on social media, feel very, very bad despite what, by most standards, appear to be quite comfortable, even desirable, situations. Why the glum face, dear privileged members of the creative class? Is it because the oceans are on fire and the Arctic is melting while a pandemic rages? Sure. Is it because those of us fortunate enough to work from home must participate in the classed, gendered, and racialized exploitation and endangerment of those who provide us with food and other essential services? Most definitely. After all, we remote workers participate in the exploitation of much more vulnerable, essential workers by means of apps, such as DoorDash, or websites, such as Amazon (van Doorn 2017; Irani 2013). We participate in Earth’s destruction when our data pass through massive data centers that process information for these apps, programs such as Zoom and Teams that we use for work, and video streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube that deliver content for our pleasure in leisure. Now, more than ever, we live what Adorno, in Minima Moralia, called “damaged life,” in which our participation is always participation in others’ oppression and exploitation as well as Earth’s destruction—a situation also highlighted in the popular TV show The Good Place.
Still, I can’t help but think of more acute, proximal experiences by which we experience these very real, very pressing global tragedies. There is a tendency to say all this occurs “virtually” or “remotely,” but everything takes place somewhere—a keen observation made recently by David Grazian (2019). Early in the pandemic, we were invited to praise Zoom as working life and, shortly thereafter, socializing itself became embedded within a technological “solution.” Not long after, we heard of “Zoom fatigue,” as all the tedious meetings in a normal working day came to be compounded by all the interactional difficulties of unstable, often overloaded internet connections. Already fraught interactions at work now became subject to the familiar “Can you hear me now?” interruptions of yesteryear’s Verizon advertisements and unwitting escalations of misinterpreted digital missives as in several grimly comical sketches from Key & Peele.
As the spring lockdowns transitioned into summer and then to fall, an entire school year came to be experienced within Zoom and other teleconferencing “solutions.” While these solutions provide for mediated audio/visual communication, they do not solve the problem of location. Not only does the software confront us with design problems (e.g., the ever-changing interface) and new social phenomena such as “Zoom bombers,” video meetings in Zoom and other conferencing software push professional interactions into intimate locations, opening private spaces up to scrutiny.
This erasure of the materialities that reproduce the divisions between public and private, work and home also pose threats to carrying out work tasks. For example, a friend of mine who works as a speech pathologist for elementary school children described the difficulties of working with kids over Zoom. Her students’ learning environment had become inseparable from the family living room. Parents loudly watched television as their child, wearing headphones, worked with my friend, the speech pathologist whose studio apartment now functioned as her classroom/office. Another friend in the Midwest taught multiple classes as an adjunct while finishing his dissertation alone in his one-room apartment, his work and writing inescapable save for his afternoon jogs. Another member of my department, fortunate enough to have multiple rooms, turned his living room into a miniature production studio that included specialized lighting, a new camera, and a microphone—a common occurrence among many professors as universities shifted to remote course delivery.
The Importance of Mundane Materialities
While this essay may seem overly personal, I hope my story and stories from friends have highlighted the affective impact of remote work’s materialities, as well as how our socio-technically constructed reality continues to be classed, racialized, and gendered. Working from home, I never feel fully at ease, and, on many days, I have been wholly unproductive as I lack the spatial, temporal, and material separations that mark work, leisure, and intimacy. Many (but certainly not all) people with whom I interacted seemed to share this feeling. That includes the aforementioned friends as well as fellow sociologist Vincent Roscigno, who recently tweeted: “[I] have been walking around wondering whether/how/if I can rediscover writing after this past year. I love writing (it’s the best!) but for me requires ritual, schedule, and predictability.” Of course, the sorts of rituals and schedules that Roscigno mentions require distinctive socio-material spaces.
The pandemic’s distinctive entanglement of technology and social relations effaces the materialities or aesthetics required to mark and reproduce boundaries between work and home, home and school, work and family, school and family, and leisure and work. Control over the socio-material conditions of work remains unevenly distributed. The ability to use and access the things that make work feel like work and home feel like home depends upon social position and is a privilege of class, intersecting with race, gender, and age. As the pandemic drags on, some continue to work remotely while others enter workplaces with heightened hazards due to the pandemic. Both situations require re-establishing or inventing new ways to demarcate boundaries materially and aesthetically between work and nonwork as well as safety and hazard.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
