I heard an interview on WNYC yesterday with Dalton Conley, talking about his new book Elsewhere, U.S.A, or more precisely, Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.
His basic idea is that technology and social change mean we have evolved from settled careers at one place of work to frenetic lives with no work-life boundaries. And in parallel, economic uncertainty has risen, increasing stress and the need to focus on work. At times he is pretty dour:
Leisure? The “good life”? What are those? Work is the central aspect of our lives. We are lucky that it is fulfilling work—work that we will probably continue to do until we are no longer capable—but it is, unlike that of my parents, all-consuming work.
He interviews well and his central observation about the disrupting impact of technology is solid but I think he is wrong about core elements. Yes, technology is allowing work to spread outside the workplace and this is causing some people to constantly check email and to be available 24/7. Part of that is personal style but as I look at it, the same technology has given great opportunities we otherwise wouldn’t have had. In my case, because I work from home I can be with my children and help them get to school every day, I’m around during the day if I need a distressing wrestle with my two year old (I have to wait until afterschool for the more challenging higher weight groups), I’m there to cook and eat with them and put them to bed. None of that would have been possible without the technology I rely on. But there’s more – I can go for rides in the park as time permits, do my shopping at off hours, and on and on. All of this means I am happy to let work intrude at other times and so I don’t begrudge talking to clients in London at 6:00am my time, or talking to a West Coast client at 10pm, it all comes with the territory and I want it like this – the thought of getting on a train and being out of town or at work from 7:00am to 8:00pm every day isn’t for me.
As I see it, if you can offer valuable services to companies that you can deliver from your home (which is what ClickNwork is about), then I think you can get the best of the work environment (intellectual stimulation, community, pay) with the benefits of home life (more leisure, better family interaction, less hassle). Conley fails to bring out these positives and sold us short.
At one point in the interview, Leonard Lopate, the interviewer asked – ‘most of these developments have had a negative affect, is there a way to reverse any of it..? and Conely falters: “Well, if I communicated completely negative affects I want to correct that”. He then goes on to explain how some of the change is “demand driven”, how a lot of people, especially professionals love their work and so on – all good but a bit late for print!
I looked on the web and see he has many of positive reviews, but others aren’t so sure. Janet Maslin in the New York Times (and International Herald Tribune) had some funny moments, saying that “Conley spends part of his time out on a limb, sawing”. She adds:
“But this book’s greater problem is the thin, iffy nature of its extended arguments. To back up the familiar claim that we have allowed merchandising to invade our private lives, he invokes (in no particular order) the selling of formerly free snacks on airplanes, slogans on T-shirts (with a thumbnail history of the T-shirt thrown in for filler) and the perils created by the bottling and marketing of water.
.. But Mr. Conley has no big new point to make. He awkwardly coins new locutions (“weisure” to conflate work and leisure, “convestment” to do the same with consumption and investment). He struggles with jargon while trying to interject the term “intravidual” into our collective conversation. Beware an “of course” when a point is anything but self-evident: “The irony, of course, is that the intravidual is just as much an ‘intervidual’ (inter meaning ‘between’), since it is the networked nature of our new, Elsewhere economy and the penetration of others into us that shatters the individual.
…He dutifully travels to Mountain View, California, to note the Orwellian nature of life at Googleplex, Google’s corporate headquarters. A pox on Mountain View: It is now the destination of choice for writers seeking to pad books with sci-fi visuals and newish-sounding but already conventional wisdom.”
Don’t get me wrong, the book is worth a read but I do think it needs better research and balance.
He’s done the rounds and in case you’re interested, here’s another interview with Neil Cohen on NPR.
