{"id":2276,"date":"2006-04-24T18:31:20","date_gmt":"2006-04-25T01:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/04\/24\/technology-family-life-and-gender\/"},"modified":"2006-04-24T18:31:20","modified_gmt":"2006-04-25T01:31:20","slug":"technology-family-life-and-gender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2276","title":{"rendered":"Technology, Family Life, and Gender"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Journal of Marriage and Family<\/a> has released a study by sociologist Noelle Chesney that indicates that cell phones are detrimental to family relationships. I am becoming increasingly anti-cell phone for this reason. The need to have to be constantly available is incredibly stressful after a while. I think it may be a good idea for families to turn off their phones at certain times of the day as a method of dealing with the invasiveness of this technology.<\/p>\n

I haven’t read the article in full just the summaries of it, but I wonder if the author connects this with what Arlie Hochschild calls the reversal of family and work cultures. In her book the Time Bind,<\/a> Hochschild argues that the division between home and work has changed and many people are finding work to be more relaxing than home. I personally felt this way over the last year or so. When I am teaching, my job is great and very relaxing–I’m able to forget the stressful things like paying bills, but as soon as I leave it is a different story.<\/p>\n

The cell phone enters this picture because it becomes impossible to tune work or family out. Having your family call you at anytime on your cell phone can create conflicts. For example, I have had meetings at unexpected times, and if anyone calls my cell phone, they are not going to get me. The person calling is expecting me to be free and suddenly when I’m not available the person gets worried calling every line. This is completely unecessary stress. For some reason we are not able to treat cell phones like home phones.<\/p>\n

I also suspect that this problem is much greater for women than it is for men. I can’t speak for other women, but I feel it really makes finding a space of our own, where we don’t have to organize, manage, and care for others, very difficult. I wonder about this with computers too (E.g.–suddenly we have to send photos of little Joe, Joe to Grandma everyweek.). I know this would be an even greater problem if I had kids; in fact, I get a little agitated when I see preteens checking in with parents on their cell phones. In this sense, the cell phone becomes a kind of surviellance tool, so we can keep up with each other. Then there is the whole language of protection and safety–cell phones make us safer, blah, blah, blah.<\/p>\n

I know the work\/family issues have been played out over and over again in feminist literature, but I think the role of modern communication technologies has been undertheorized, and the more I think about this the more I feel like these technologies are just one more way to exercise social control over women (children and employees too). In a way this is more of a rant, but I do frequently feel this way about my cell phone and some of the other communication technologies. Am I too much of a conspiracy theorist? Do you think this is true?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Journal of Marriage and Family has released a study by sociologist Noelle Chesney that indicates that cell phones are detrimental to family relationships. I am becoming increasingly anti-cell phone for this reason. The need to have to be constantly … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116,31,94,92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-families-structures-divorce-etc","category-feminism-sexism-etc","category-gender-and-the-economy","category-whatever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}