Are we all becoming underappreciated housewives?
Historically, women who were invariably confined to the private sphere tended to engage in much work that was underappreciated, non-paid and taken for granted. This work and its construction as ‘mothers’ duties’ within society also perpetuated patriarchal structures that limited female career advancement and the ability of many females to explore creative avenues and have their input both creatively and otherwise in their society.
The patriarchal structures that were underpinned through these constructions of female labour allowed male advancement of hetero-masculine values but also created a dependency of women on the males around them. Their husbands, brothers, fathers and because of this dependency and asymmetric power structures, lead to an inherent bias within societal structures favouring the male.
In recent decades the above has been strongly questioned and critiqued, and rightfully so. Many important historical discoveries and inventions were bought about as a result of female creativity.
I would like to use the above analogy in a somewhat metaphorical sense to indicate how now rather than explicitly males, it is technology that we have all become dependant on and through constructions of what constitutes labour.
Does all labour deserve some sort of remuneration?
Cleaning, cooking, all those routine jobs of the past apparently didn’t.
Is it remuneration enough to be given free access to for example Facebook or Google Maps in exchange for your status updates (indicating brand bias) or for your GPS route indicating your travel habit. Information packaged up and analysed in order to facilitate what is ultimately profit seeking activity glossed over with terms like ‘innovation’, ‘tech improvement’ that fail to examine the shortcomings of what Ekbia and Nardi (2014) term ‘Heteromation’. Where rather than and automated process completed in full by a computer or other programmed instrument, the human is also integrated in the completion of this task through their labour. Labour that is at best, extremely poorly paid. Labour that it gleaned off societal subjects by drawing on their sense of self and their sense of need and the dependency on technological supplementation of their everyday lives.
Dependency is not a positive word I feel. It does adequately describe our relationship with technology just as it described the relationship of housewives to their male spouses and can be better termed ‘Technological Dependency’.
Regarding the historical gender divisions of labour, there we historical notions that ‘hysterical’ females needed the guidance of the ‘rational’ male. Thereby granting males a sense knowledge superiority across society, further entrenching the dependency because it was a collective dependency — on the whole, all females were considered emotional even by females. We see parallels with how difficult it is to take breaks from our technology. We feel cut off and like an antisocial who has left his peers, cutting them off from society, from the collective, and the normal actions and daily practices that belie it.
I guess this blog just aims to indicate what many have aimed to indicate in the past. We must not be euphemistically duped into blindly (as a society) accepting what we are given by those in power (such as Amazon/Facebook/Google). We must question these constructions that see us willingly relinquishing our labour without remuneration. Because just as women realized, we will realize that these things are possible to change, no matter how entrenched.
Reference:
Ekbia, H, Nardi, B, ‘Heteromation and its discontents’, First Monday, vol. 19, no. 6, pp 1–16, http://journals, uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5331/4090.
