Can You Be Too Connected? Part 2
After catching herself rushing through her daughters' bedtime stories so that she could get back to her computer one evening, journalist Maggie Jackson decided to take a hard look at her work/life balance. Jackson, then a workplace columnist for the Associated Press, had made setting aside time for her daughters a priority. Yet thanks to e-mail, cell phones, and the other instant communications devices most professions require these days, work had wormed its way into her precious home life.
Sound familiar?
In What's Happening to Home: Balancing Work, Life, And Refuge in the Information Age, due out this month from Sorin Books, Jackson notes that in an era of home offices -- and of workplaces that include gyms and day-care centers -- it's getting harder for most people to distinguish between when they're at home or at work, on the clock or off. The effects of that trend and how the average person can deal with them are the centerpiece of Jackson's book.
The technology that makes working from home possible, as well as the support of employers who grant more flexibility than ever, have been a boon for many employees and increased their options, especially when a child is sick or there's a foot of new snow. But Jackson asks: Once we get totally wired, how easy will it be for most people to disconnect when it's time to relax or hang out with our loved ones? Not very easy, she finds.
Jackson's book isn't a how-to-cope tome, though she offers examples of how she and others manage to balance work life and home life. Mostly, she sets out to show where working life may be headed -- and probe whether Americans really want to live that way. "We risk turning the home into a center of work and communications, and losing it as a refuge," says Jackson, now a New York-based freelancer and contributor to The Boston Globe and The New York Times.
With unemployment as high as it is, it may be tougher these days to tell your boss to take a hike if she tracks you down on the cell while you're coaching Little League or heading a Girl Scouts troop. Yet after September 11, many people have felt the desire to step back and examine their lives. "I think people are very serious about figuring out not so much how they can work less but rather how they can work better and find time for private life," Jackson says.
In chapter two of her book, entitled "Private Lives: Making Time for Home in a Connected World," Jackson discusses why it's important to find quiet at home in a world of chirping cell phones, beeping computers, and bleating pagers.
Here's the second half of that chapter (for Part 1, see BW Online 2/11/02):
I worried when I first began to see companies offer home computers for little or no cost to their employees. If it's difficult for a secretary to keep from being on-call twenty-four hours a day, it will be no easier for an auto worker or a flight attendant to protect their homes from intrusions. Ford and Delta, the pioneers in this endeavor, stress that their programs are voluntary, although the dirt-cheap cost and encouragement from the company to enroll ensure that the computers are distributed company-wide. Once connected, then what?
The companies say they won't monitor their employees' home Internet use, yet I wonder about management's expectations. "We're looking at this as an extension of our business tools, so people will be able to be more closely aligned with the company," says Delta spokesman Kip Smith. It's true that all workers, up and down the corporate ladder, need to be tech-savvy these days. Yet "closely aligning" workers with the company could quickly place employees on-call. As part of some company computer giveaway programs, for example, workers will begin taking training programs home to do at night. What happens when Joe Autoworker doesn't see the shift change posted at 10 p.m. on his home computer? What if an off-duty flight attendant uses the company computer in her home to send a racist e-mail to a coworker? One thing is clear: such giveaway programs extend "the long arm of the workplace," says sociologist Arlie Hochschild.
Armed with a court order, Northwest Airlines in 1999 hired a consultant to search the home computer hard drives of twenty union flight attendants after the airline experienced sick-outs during a long-running contract dispute. (Most of the computers were handed over at locations other than the attendants' homes.) Northwest said it had no interest in the personal files of its workers but was entitled to see if there was evidence of a sick-out conspiracy. After the contract was settled, the airline ordered its copies of the hard drives destroyed. Still, the case raises important questions about privacy and the home, as do the computer giveaway programs. In a world where technology is fast making workers on-call, we should think carefully about the price we pay for making all places, including home, connected.
We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. But do we have the will?
Today, the privacy of our homes is easily punctured. Clients see our dirty laundry, literally and figuratively. Bosses and colleagues interrupt breakfast and bedtime. Work creeps into our thoughts, unseen but needing attention, like e-mail beaming into our computers. Children easily connect to online communities, while barely spending time with family members. How are we coping? Increasingly, a marketplace is being born, where not only personal data but private space and time are being bought and sold, bargained and bartered.
Linda Waali is a troubleshooter, on contract to Microsoft's licensing and anti-piracy department. She helps fix computer problems for customers worldwide, wearing a pager at all times and keeping a cell phone on when she's out of reach of her office or home phones. In exchange for taking this job, she got a substantial raise. "I didn't have to accept this position," she tells me, even as she admits that she can't envision working this way for a long time.
She's rarely called during the night, yet finds that she sleeps fitfully. "I hear the slightest noise, and I wake up.... Was that the phone? Was that the pager?" she explains. When we first spoke, she was eagerly awaiting her first vacation without the technology, a weeklong trip to Las Vegas. She yearned for a full night of sleep, a day off without interruption. Bringing the technology along would defeat the purpose of a vacation, she assures me. "In the middle of a hot blackjack run, you want to tell me that China's having connectivity problems?" Yet even arranging the vacation wasn't easy. She had to find a substitute on-call worker, then badger her bosses for weeks before they gave the final okay to the trip. Once sold, Linda Waali found her privacy hard to buy back, even for one week.
Humans have long bought privacy, especially at home. Fences, walls, burglar alarms, and locks have been intended to keep out robbers and voyeurs. Answering machines, caller ID, and other tools are used to manage accessibility. Politicians and celebrities must go a step further, trading privacy in pursuit of fame, power, and wealth. But never before have people like you and me faced greater pressure and opportunity to sell our own privacy. "We will increasingly face tradeoffs between maintaining our privacy and getting better service by giving some of it up," writes William J. Mitchell, dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, in his book e-topia. (Taking this trend a step further, a string of Internet companies are offering people the chance to earn commissions by including ads in their e-mails. That means people now have the chance to sell their friend's privacy, not just their own.) Most frightening is the rise in people willing to sell, trade, or barter the privacy of their own homes.
Natalie Bee, the South Carolina hospital secretary, remains connected to work night and day because her boss expects her to, and because she wants to live up to these expectations. But she also brings work into her private life as a quid pro quo. Several days a week, she leaves the office early to attend night school. In return, she gives up private time-probably far more than the hours she misses at work. Implicitly, Bee is striking a bargain with her workplace. In order to acquire the flexibility to pursue a life outside work, she and many others of us are bartering away a growing segment of their private lives.
If privacy is only for people with something to hide, then its value has surely fallen.
The marketplace for privacy helps explain another modern phenomenon: webcams. I first started talking with Linda Waali because she had purchased one of these tiny cameras, becoming one of the five million Americans to do so by 2000. A webcam broadcasts a live video picture to the web, for all the connected world to see. Certainly, some of the cameras are being set up for suspect reasons. But it intrigued me that people who consider themselves private, who are worlds away from being porn queens or exhibitionists, also have installed them. I thought their reasoning would tell me something about the changing nature of privacy, especially at home.
When Waali is at the office, she trains her camera on her five cats' favorite sunny corner. "It's a way of catching up on my kids," she jokes. She also keeps the camera running while she's at home, a habit that she calls sharing "a slice of life" with the outside world. She doesn't appear all that often, or for very long before the camera, which is set up in her home office. She'll wave to her mother, or come into view when crossing the room. Yet its presence changes her home life. Waali keeps a hat hanging on the doorknob of her home office, which she flings over the camera if she wants privacy. She's considering posting a sign on the door in order to warn guests when the camera's running. In setting up the camera, she must constantly navigate between the off-camera, private world and the "slice of life" she puts on public display.
Still, she's adamant that she hasn't compromised her privacy, saying she chooses the camera's view, can turn it off at any time, and has nothing to hide. "I'm not going to take a shower in front of the camera," she told me. "But if you want to see what I'm going to have for dinner, go ahead. Does mac-and-cheese thrill you?" Other webcam users I interviewed felt just as casual about the public viewing of their home lives. People often told me that originally they signed up so an elderly relative could see video of their children. But strangers on the web can watch them, and the software even enables camera owners to see how many "hits" their site is getting. Truetech, a Dutch company that makes webcam software, ironically gets a constant string of e-mails from users who are outraged that they are being watched!
Still, the webcam users I spoke with were amused, intrigued, or uncaring that unseen eyes were watching their homes. "It's just life," computer programmer Lou Lange told me. "It's just me going through my paces." This view told me a lot about how privacy had changed in this country, and why people would allow their jobs to increasingly intrude on their home life. It's easier to sell, barter, or fritter away something that's no longer held sacred. If privacy is only for people with something to hide, then its value has surely fallen.
Fallen, but not disappeared. Few people are willing to squander all of the private spaces in their lives. Most webcam users don't run their cameras twenty-four hours a day, nor do they set them up in every corner of their houses. Most secretaries admitted, after we'd talked for a while, that they were chafing at their electronic leashes. I didn't mention the words "sanctuary" or "refuge" in interviews, but these words surfaced deep into conversations. With varying degrees of success, people are trying to retain some control over the intrusion of the public into the sanctuary of their homes.
Colin Ochel, the computer animator, held off for a year before allowing a laptop in his new apartment. Although he now uses it just to surf the Net for pleasure and order takeout food, the presence of the machine has changed his home. "It's weird now. It's becoming . . ." he pauses, fumbling for words. "Technology is in my home, whereas before, it was a complete sanctuary." Still, he tentatively concludes that he's better at drawing boundaries after life in the pods. He believes he's ready to reopen the doors of home to work.
Just before I first met Ochel, he bought a weekend home, a 160-year-old house in Newport, Rhode Island. The second time we talk, he slumps wearily in his chair, clad in a torn white sweater. But he grows visibly excited as he outlines his plans to make this summer home a virtual office. At the top of the house, he'll turn a sunlit room into both a painting studio and his home office. Eventually, he'd like to live there during the summers, maybe visiting New York weekly. "I can shut work off when I want to," he says. "I'm not afraid of mixing it all together." His only fear is loneliness. "I've always been scared of that, I've always been scared of the isolation," Ochel admits. He got burned in his live/work space and senses encroaching intrusions in his first home, his sanctuary. So he's taking great care to make sure that in Newport he'll have access to the world, but it will have the least access possible to him.
Many people are turning to this method of survival in order to protect a modicum of sanctuary. In the marketplace of privacy, one-way access is attainable to a degree-for those with power. A secretary may not stand a chance of limiting her boss's access to her, but the boss has the power to carve out private time. This dance of accessibility even occurs within families, Jan English-Lueck has found. An anthropologist at San Jose State University, she has been studying highly connected Silicon Valley families for a decade. The prevalence of the strategy of one-way access "increasingly leads to the use of home as an environment in which interruptions can be carefully managed, even between family members," she observes.
Turning technology on and off in order to preserve the refuge of home, however, can lead to an increased willingness to turn people on and off. With call waiting, for example, recipients of telephone calls are effectively opening and closing doors to others, depending on whether they wish to speak with them. The recipient of the phone call controls the access. I'm also struck by the attitude people often have toward others in chat rooms: they are disposable. One webcam owner told me he's quite adept at judging whether he wants to continue a friendship on the web. How long does that take? "Twenty-five minutes," he said.
Perhaps a kind of privacy can be forged in this way, but if carried too far, this becomes a fragile privacy born out of power and control, not mutual respect. Stephen L. Talbott, editor of the influential online newsletter NetFuture, argues forcefully for the preservation of privacy based on the "lowering of our eyes." Talbott believes that privacy based on high walls and fences, or symbolically, caller ID or answering machines, is a kind of false privacy. He's mostly talking about data protection, but his thoughts resonate for people trying to find private times and spaces in their lives. "Privacy, after all, is scarcely relevant to the individual living behind a chainlink fence," he writes. "It can be a concern and a value only where we present ourselves to each other. The 'space' we ask for when we ask for privacy, is a space fashioned within and defended by a respectful community. There is no other enduring defense."
Privacy protects us, allowing us to nurture our most intimate relations with others and with ourselves....
As part of a winter spent studying our city, my second grader had to interview her family members. She asked questions about various landmarks and the apartment building in which we lived. Then she asked us, "What is your favorite place in New York?" I mulled it over, torn between naming my favorite museum or the outdoor ice skating rink where we spend many Saturday mornings. My seven-year-old and four-year-old, on the other hand, didn't hesitate. "Home," they answered. There wasn't even a close second in their opinions.
I was surprised that I hadn't even thought of that answer. My sentiments leaned more toward the outside world, where I could immerse myself in an activity totally unrelated to work. Metropolis magazine found a similar attitude when its editors questioned 360 people about where they go to find privacy. The respondents said they find privacy by gardening, taking a walk or a bath, going to sleep, or waiting until late at night when they're alone in the house.
"Privacy is not necessarily something people associate with place," wrote editor Akiko Busch, noting how attitudes toward privacy had evolved markedly from just a generation ago. "Rather, it may be defined by a change in activity or by a specific time." When I read this, I thought of a secretary who giggled as she told me how she finds private time. "It sounds kind of sick-but I love to shovel snow," said Sue Nowicki. "It takes your mind away. I can be in Hawaii, even as I shovel snow."
Nowicki, who works at a small college in northern Michigan, turned in her pager a few months before our interview and began limiting her time spent working at home. She wanted to return to the hobbies she used to enjoy, sculpting and sewing quilts. "I had a reality check," she said. "I wasn't having fun at home anymore." In her basement, near her home office, she has a crafts room where she deliberately does not work. "It's my own little refuge," she says.
The home is no longer idealized as a castle, no longer an impermeable oasis shielding us from work and our fellow man. And that is good. The Industrial Age ideal of home as a private fiefdom, while not fully realized, inspired stifling social conventions and a schism between two crucial realms-work and home. Yet domestic privacy is too important to be entirely left behind as a new century unfolds. Privacy protects us, allowing us to nurture our most intimate relations with others and with ourselves, and we instinctively know this. That is why so many of us are uneasy when we bring work and clients home, and stay accessible to others night and day. We are not content to live in glass houses. We are trying to preserve a measure of privacy in our increasingly permeable homes.
Creating a marketplace for privacy, however, is a dangerous solution. When we negotiate not just personal data but time and space in the domestic realm, we are turning the privacy of our homes into a commodity. Those with power can control access to themselves. Others will barter and trade in this market as best they can. Ultimately, we all lose by erecting virtual versions of fences and walls-call waiting, caller ID, voice mail-or by selling our privacy to our employers. Instead, we need to revalue domestic privacy, rekindle our mutual respect for the refuge of home. A boss who sends an e-mail on Saturday sends an implicit message devaluing home. A routine call to a coworker who is on vacation undermines his privacy.
To revalue domestic privacy, we would do well to look anew at time. Just as today's architecture of home-work teaches us about the importance of keeping a place for home, so our increasing techno-accessibility should open our eyes to the importance of preserving time for home. Being "on-call" via cell phone, e-mail, pager, and fax breaks down the temporal boundaries that mark periods of rest, intimacy, peace-private moments and hours that allow us to create a home that truly is a refuge. Again, the time and place for home can be flexible and changing. In this day and age, few of us will ever want or be able to create a home that is purely domestic, private, and separate from the world. I have sacrificed corners of my living room and bedroom to work, but as a result, I'm trying to keep my dining room consciously "home"-an intersection of private time and space.
Making time for home is not easy, but it's possible. Echoing Danelle Guthrie, Jan Monti chose to redraw the boundaries between work and home by moving her business to a separate office. Sue Nowicki turned in her pager and began limiting her time spent working at home. Colin Ochel is still experimenting. He's introduced technology into his apartment, but keeping the flow of work there to a trickle. He's determined to create a second refuge in a far-off home, connected to work but separate. After living a wholly public life, he has a growing respect for the privacy needed to create home. And perhaps if others respect this privacy, he will not have to make his home into a fortress.
I rarely like to do two things at once. I've always tried to do my work and then play. Even juggling two stories at one time irritates me. I just can't envision myself making cell phone calls on the nursery school pumpkin patch trip. Or is it just a matter of getting used to it?
One mother on the school trip quietly made cell phone calls even on the hayride. Was that better than not being there? How many calls are too many? Long ago when I worked as an editor in the evenings, one of my bosses used to call me as he gave his toddler a bath. (I used to wonder whether he'd electrocute her if he dropped the phone.) At the time, this seemed very unusual. Few people blended work and home to that extent. It looked like he was an overachiever who couldn't turn work off once he got home. In contrast, the mother on the pumpkin patch trip drew no irritated glares or stares. In fact, I recall that a father was making cell phone calls on the hayride as well. We are growing more accustomed to the sight of people dividing themselves between places-taking care of business while physically remaining right next to you.
But the ability to have a "dual presence" raises the question of when we need to be really here, or there. When a commuter is on the nightly train, using a cell phone to finish up a bit of work on the way home, he's mentally "there" and physically "here" on the train. The trouble is, his thoughts and voice are most distinctly "here" for all other commuters to hear!
My local paper carries a weekly column of anecdotes about New York City life sent in by residents and tourists. Lately, I've often noticed stories concerning cell phones on buses. (They don't yet work on the subway.) One day, a reader told how a caller loudly phoned home to ask if her family wanted salmon or chicken for supper that night. Not long into the conversation, an irritated bus rider shouted "Salmon!", prompting other passengers to take up the cry, "Salmon! Salmon! Salmon!" Unconsciously or not, the riders were yanking this woman back into the physical context of her call-the bus-and reminding her that her actions affected them too.
The mom on the hayride talked so discreetly that her calls may have escaped the notice of most other parents. Yet she was entangling herself in two social situations as well. During her calls, part of her remained with her daughter, part of her stayed accessible to work. If she hadn't taken the cell phone, she would have had to miss the field trip, or miss work to go on the outing. But is partly being there good enough, for either her child or her work? That's a tough question. I have a cell phone, and I once took it along while shepherding my daughter to a friend's birthday party. To my horror, the business call I was waiting for came through while I was in the bathroom. I literally had to pull up my pants, run out of the room with the ringing phone, and feign normalcy as I answered. While glad that I caught the call, I can't say that I was "all there" during the party, before, during, or even after my conversation.
I've never made a phone call on a bus, but I used to call friends while walking to and from the bus stop, feeling gleeful that I could slip in a social call during this "dead time." I don't do that anymore. During the call, too many unpredictables occurred, leading me to cut short the calls. Or I'd get to my front door and hurriedly end the chat so I could see my children. I began to think, why call friends at times when I expect them to adhere to my circumstances?
The cell phone makes so many of our activities portable, which is good. But being divided between two places puts us in two contexts. We don't like to think of it that way. We assume that we may freely choose between the two situations, tuning out one while attending to the other and vice versa. Yet we are involved in both situations, and we run the risk of being fair to no one, not even ourselves. During my calls on my walks home, I seemed to be usually the one who got to choose whether my "here" or their "there" mattered more. I wanted others to be accessible to me, although I wasn't always comfortable being accessible to others.
Nowadays as I walk home from the bus stop, I turn off my cell phone and let my mind wander. As I amble along beside Central Park, I try to notice the pastel colors of the sky at sunset, or the phase of the rising moon, or the hurried gait of my fellow commuters. I find that the "here" and "there" of my body and my mental wanderings no longer clash
Sound familiar?
In What's Happening to Home: Balancing Work, Life, And Refuge in the Information Age, due out this month from Sorin Books, Jackson notes that in an era of home offices -- and of workplaces that include gyms and day-care centers -- it's getting harder for most people to distinguish between when they're at home or at work, on the clock or off. The effects of that trend and how the average person can deal with them are the centerpiece of Jackson's book.
The technology that makes working from home possible, as well as the support of employers who grant more flexibility than ever, have been a boon for many employees and increased their options, especially when a child is sick or there's a foot of new snow. But Jackson asks: Once we get totally wired, how easy will it be for most people to disconnect when it's time to relax or hang out with our loved ones? Not very easy, she finds.
Jackson's book isn't a how-to-cope tome, though she offers examples of how she and others manage to balance work life and home life. Mostly, she sets out to show where working life may be headed -- and probe whether Americans really want to live that way. "We risk turning the home into a center of work and communications, and losing it as a refuge," says Jackson, now a New York-based freelancer and contributor to The Boston Globe and The New York Times.
With unemployment as high as it is, it may be tougher these days to tell your boss to take a hike if she tracks you down on the cell while you're coaching Little League or heading a Girl Scouts troop. Yet after September 11, many people have felt the desire to step back and examine their lives. "I think people are very serious about figuring out not so much how they can work less but rather how they can work better and find time for private life," Jackson says.
In chapter two of her book, entitled "Private Lives: Making Time for Home in a Connected World," Jackson discusses why it's important to find quiet at home in a world of chirping cell phones, beeping computers, and bleating pagers.
Here's the second half of that chapter (for Part 1, see BW Online 2/11/02):
I worried when I first began to see companies offer home computers for little or no cost to their employees. If it's difficult for a secretary to keep from being on-call twenty-four hours a day, it will be no easier for an auto worker or a flight attendant to protect their homes from intrusions. Ford and Delta, the pioneers in this endeavor, stress that their programs are voluntary, although the dirt-cheap cost and encouragement from the company to enroll ensure that the computers are distributed company-wide. Once connected, then what?
The companies say they won't monitor their employees' home Internet use, yet I wonder about management's expectations. "We're looking at this as an extension of our business tools, so people will be able to be more closely aligned with the company," says Delta spokesman Kip Smith. It's true that all workers, up and down the corporate ladder, need to be tech-savvy these days. Yet "closely aligning" workers with the company could quickly place employees on-call. As part of some company computer giveaway programs, for example, workers will begin taking training programs home to do at night. What happens when Joe Autoworker doesn't see the shift change posted at 10 p.m. on his home computer? What if an off-duty flight attendant uses the company computer in her home to send a racist e-mail to a coworker? One thing is clear: such giveaway programs extend "the long arm of the workplace," says sociologist Arlie Hochschild.
Armed with a court order, Northwest Airlines in 1999 hired a consultant to search the home computer hard drives of twenty union flight attendants after the airline experienced sick-outs during a long-running contract dispute. (Most of the computers were handed over at locations other than the attendants' homes.) Northwest said it had no interest in the personal files of its workers but was entitled to see if there was evidence of a sick-out conspiracy. After the contract was settled, the airline ordered its copies of the hard drives destroyed. Still, the case raises important questions about privacy and the home, as do the computer giveaway programs. In a world where technology is fast making workers on-call, we should think carefully about the price we pay for making all places, including home, connected.
We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. But do we have the will?
Today, the privacy of our homes is easily punctured. Clients see our dirty laundry, literally and figuratively. Bosses and colleagues interrupt breakfast and bedtime. Work creeps into our thoughts, unseen but needing attention, like e-mail beaming into our computers. Children easily connect to online communities, while barely spending time with family members. How are we coping? Increasingly, a marketplace is being born, where not only personal data but private space and time are being bought and sold, bargained and bartered.
Linda Waali is a troubleshooter, on contract to Microsoft's licensing and anti-piracy department. She helps fix computer problems for customers worldwide, wearing a pager at all times and keeping a cell phone on when she's out of reach of her office or home phones. In exchange for taking this job, she got a substantial raise. "I didn't have to accept this position," she tells me, even as she admits that she can't envision working this way for a long time.
She's rarely called during the night, yet finds that she sleeps fitfully. "I hear the slightest noise, and I wake up.... Was that the phone? Was that the pager?" she explains. When we first spoke, she was eagerly awaiting her first vacation without the technology, a weeklong trip to Las Vegas. She yearned for a full night of sleep, a day off without interruption. Bringing the technology along would defeat the purpose of a vacation, she assures me. "In the middle of a hot blackjack run, you want to tell me that China's having connectivity problems?" Yet even arranging the vacation wasn't easy. She had to find a substitute on-call worker, then badger her bosses for weeks before they gave the final okay to the trip. Once sold, Linda Waali found her privacy hard to buy back, even for one week.
Humans have long bought privacy, especially at home. Fences, walls, burglar alarms, and locks have been intended to keep out robbers and voyeurs. Answering machines, caller ID, and other tools are used to manage accessibility. Politicians and celebrities must go a step further, trading privacy in pursuit of fame, power, and wealth. But never before have people like you and me faced greater pressure and opportunity to sell our own privacy. "We will increasingly face tradeoffs between maintaining our privacy and getting better service by giving some of it up," writes William J. Mitchell, dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, in his book e-topia. (Taking this trend a step further, a string of Internet companies are offering people the chance to earn commissions by including ads in their e-mails. That means people now have the chance to sell their friend's privacy, not just their own.) Most frightening is the rise in people willing to sell, trade, or barter the privacy of their own homes.
Natalie Bee, the South Carolina hospital secretary, remains connected to work night and day because her boss expects her to, and because she wants to live up to these expectations. But she also brings work into her private life as a quid pro quo. Several days a week, she leaves the office early to attend night school. In return, she gives up private time-probably far more than the hours she misses at work. Implicitly, Bee is striking a bargain with her workplace. In order to acquire the flexibility to pursue a life outside work, she and many others of us are bartering away a growing segment of their private lives.
If privacy is only for people with something to hide, then its value has surely fallen.
The marketplace for privacy helps explain another modern phenomenon: webcams. I first started talking with Linda Waali because she had purchased one of these tiny cameras, becoming one of the five million Americans to do so by 2000. A webcam broadcasts a live video picture to the web, for all the connected world to see. Certainly, some of the cameras are being set up for suspect reasons. But it intrigued me that people who consider themselves private, who are worlds away from being porn queens or exhibitionists, also have installed them. I thought their reasoning would tell me something about the changing nature of privacy, especially at home.
When Waali is at the office, she trains her camera on her five cats' favorite sunny corner. "It's a way of catching up on my kids," she jokes. She also keeps the camera running while she's at home, a habit that she calls sharing "a slice of life" with the outside world. She doesn't appear all that often, or for very long before the camera, which is set up in her home office. She'll wave to her mother, or come into view when crossing the room. Yet its presence changes her home life. Waali keeps a hat hanging on the doorknob of her home office, which she flings over the camera if she wants privacy. She's considering posting a sign on the door in order to warn guests when the camera's running. In setting up the camera, she must constantly navigate between the off-camera, private world and the "slice of life" she puts on public display.
Still, she's adamant that she hasn't compromised her privacy, saying she chooses the camera's view, can turn it off at any time, and has nothing to hide. "I'm not going to take a shower in front of the camera," she told me. "But if you want to see what I'm going to have for dinner, go ahead. Does mac-and-cheese thrill you?" Other webcam users I interviewed felt just as casual about the public viewing of their home lives. People often told me that originally they signed up so an elderly relative could see video of their children. But strangers on the web can watch them, and the software even enables camera owners to see how many "hits" their site is getting. Truetech, a Dutch company that makes webcam software, ironically gets a constant string of e-mails from users who are outraged that they are being watched!
Still, the webcam users I spoke with were amused, intrigued, or uncaring that unseen eyes were watching their homes. "It's just life," computer programmer Lou Lange told me. "It's just me going through my paces." This view told me a lot about how privacy had changed in this country, and why people would allow their jobs to increasingly intrude on their home life. It's easier to sell, barter, or fritter away something that's no longer held sacred. If privacy is only for people with something to hide, then its value has surely fallen.
Fallen, but not disappeared. Few people are willing to squander all of the private spaces in their lives. Most webcam users don't run their cameras twenty-four hours a day, nor do they set them up in every corner of their houses. Most secretaries admitted, after we'd talked for a while, that they were chafing at their electronic leashes. I didn't mention the words "sanctuary" or "refuge" in interviews, but these words surfaced deep into conversations. With varying degrees of success, people are trying to retain some control over the intrusion of the public into the sanctuary of their homes.
Colin Ochel, the computer animator, held off for a year before allowing a laptop in his new apartment. Although he now uses it just to surf the Net for pleasure and order takeout food, the presence of the machine has changed his home. "It's weird now. It's becoming . . ." he pauses, fumbling for words. "Technology is in my home, whereas before, it was a complete sanctuary." Still, he tentatively concludes that he's better at drawing boundaries after life in the pods. He believes he's ready to reopen the doors of home to work.
Just before I first met Ochel, he bought a weekend home, a 160-year-old house in Newport, Rhode Island. The second time we talk, he slumps wearily in his chair, clad in a torn white sweater. But he grows visibly excited as he outlines his plans to make this summer home a virtual office. At the top of the house, he'll turn a sunlit room into both a painting studio and his home office. Eventually, he'd like to live there during the summers, maybe visiting New York weekly. "I can shut work off when I want to," he says. "I'm not afraid of mixing it all together." His only fear is loneliness. "I've always been scared of that, I've always been scared of the isolation," Ochel admits. He got burned in his live/work space and senses encroaching intrusions in his first home, his sanctuary. So he's taking great care to make sure that in Newport he'll have access to the world, but it will have the least access possible to him.
Many people are turning to this method of survival in order to protect a modicum of sanctuary. In the marketplace of privacy, one-way access is attainable to a degree-for those with power. A secretary may not stand a chance of limiting her boss's access to her, but the boss has the power to carve out private time. This dance of accessibility even occurs within families, Jan English-Lueck has found. An anthropologist at San Jose State University, she has been studying highly connected Silicon Valley families for a decade. The prevalence of the strategy of one-way access "increasingly leads to the use of home as an environment in which interruptions can be carefully managed, even between family members," she observes.
Turning technology on and off in order to preserve the refuge of home, however, can lead to an increased willingness to turn people on and off. With call waiting, for example, recipients of telephone calls are effectively opening and closing doors to others, depending on whether they wish to speak with them. The recipient of the phone call controls the access. I'm also struck by the attitude people often have toward others in chat rooms: they are disposable. One webcam owner told me he's quite adept at judging whether he wants to continue a friendship on the web. How long does that take? "Twenty-five minutes," he said.
Perhaps a kind of privacy can be forged in this way, but if carried too far, this becomes a fragile privacy born out of power and control, not mutual respect. Stephen L. Talbott, editor of the influential online newsletter NetFuture, argues forcefully for the preservation of privacy based on the "lowering of our eyes." Talbott believes that privacy based on high walls and fences, or symbolically, caller ID or answering machines, is a kind of false privacy. He's mostly talking about data protection, but his thoughts resonate for people trying to find private times and spaces in their lives. "Privacy, after all, is scarcely relevant to the individual living behind a chainlink fence," he writes. "It can be a concern and a value only where we present ourselves to each other. The 'space' we ask for when we ask for privacy, is a space fashioned within and defended by a respectful community. There is no other enduring defense."
Privacy protects us, allowing us to nurture our most intimate relations with others and with ourselves....
As part of a winter spent studying our city, my second grader had to interview her family members. She asked questions about various landmarks and the apartment building in which we lived. Then she asked us, "What is your favorite place in New York?" I mulled it over, torn between naming my favorite museum or the outdoor ice skating rink where we spend many Saturday mornings. My seven-year-old and four-year-old, on the other hand, didn't hesitate. "Home," they answered. There wasn't even a close second in their opinions.
I was surprised that I hadn't even thought of that answer. My sentiments leaned more toward the outside world, where I could immerse myself in an activity totally unrelated to work. Metropolis magazine found a similar attitude when its editors questioned 360 people about where they go to find privacy. The respondents said they find privacy by gardening, taking a walk or a bath, going to sleep, or waiting until late at night when they're alone in the house.
"Privacy is not necessarily something people associate with place," wrote editor Akiko Busch, noting how attitudes toward privacy had evolved markedly from just a generation ago. "Rather, it may be defined by a change in activity or by a specific time." When I read this, I thought of a secretary who giggled as she told me how she finds private time. "It sounds kind of sick-but I love to shovel snow," said Sue Nowicki. "It takes your mind away. I can be in Hawaii, even as I shovel snow."
Nowicki, who works at a small college in northern Michigan, turned in her pager a few months before our interview and began limiting her time spent working at home. She wanted to return to the hobbies she used to enjoy, sculpting and sewing quilts. "I had a reality check," she said. "I wasn't having fun at home anymore." In her basement, near her home office, she has a crafts room where she deliberately does not work. "It's my own little refuge," she says.
The home is no longer idealized as a castle, no longer an impermeable oasis shielding us from work and our fellow man. And that is good. The Industrial Age ideal of home as a private fiefdom, while not fully realized, inspired stifling social conventions and a schism between two crucial realms-work and home. Yet domestic privacy is too important to be entirely left behind as a new century unfolds. Privacy protects us, allowing us to nurture our most intimate relations with others and with ourselves, and we instinctively know this. That is why so many of us are uneasy when we bring work and clients home, and stay accessible to others night and day. We are not content to live in glass houses. We are trying to preserve a measure of privacy in our increasingly permeable homes.
Creating a marketplace for privacy, however, is a dangerous solution. When we negotiate not just personal data but time and space in the domestic realm, we are turning the privacy of our homes into a commodity. Those with power can control access to themselves. Others will barter and trade in this market as best they can. Ultimately, we all lose by erecting virtual versions of fences and walls-call waiting, caller ID, voice mail-or by selling our privacy to our employers. Instead, we need to revalue domestic privacy, rekindle our mutual respect for the refuge of home. A boss who sends an e-mail on Saturday sends an implicit message devaluing home. A routine call to a coworker who is on vacation undermines his privacy.
To revalue domestic privacy, we would do well to look anew at time. Just as today's architecture of home-work teaches us about the importance of keeping a place for home, so our increasing techno-accessibility should open our eyes to the importance of preserving time for home. Being "on-call" via cell phone, e-mail, pager, and fax breaks down the temporal boundaries that mark periods of rest, intimacy, peace-private moments and hours that allow us to create a home that truly is a refuge. Again, the time and place for home can be flexible and changing. In this day and age, few of us will ever want or be able to create a home that is purely domestic, private, and separate from the world. I have sacrificed corners of my living room and bedroom to work, but as a result, I'm trying to keep my dining room consciously "home"-an intersection of private time and space.
Making time for home is not easy, but it's possible. Echoing Danelle Guthrie, Jan Monti chose to redraw the boundaries between work and home by moving her business to a separate office. Sue Nowicki turned in her pager and began limiting her time spent working at home. Colin Ochel is still experimenting. He's introduced technology into his apartment, but keeping the flow of work there to a trickle. He's determined to create a second refuge in a far-off home, connected to work but separate. After living a wholly public life, he has a growing respect for the privacy needed to create home. And perhaps if others respect this privacy, he will not have to make his home into a fortress.
I rarely like to do two things at once. I've always tried to do my work and then play. Even juggling two stories at one time irritates me. I just can't envision myself making cell phone calls on the nursery school pumpkin patch trip. Or is it just a matter of getting used to it?
One mother on the school trip quietly made cell phone calls even on the hayride. Was that better than not being there? How many calls are too many? Long ago when I worked as an editor in the evenings, one of my bosses used to call me as he gave his toddler a bath. (I used to wonder whether he'd electrocute her if he dropped the phone.) At the time, this seemed very unusual. Few people blended work and home to that extent. It looked like he was an overachiever who couldn't turn work off once he got home. In contrast, the mother on the pumpkin patch trip drew no irritated glares or stares. In fact, I recall that a father was making cell phone calls on the hayride as well. We are growing more accustomed to the sight of people dividing themselves between places-taking care of business while physically remaining right next to you.
But the ability to have a "dual presence" raises the question of when we need to be really here, or there. When a commuter is on the nightly train, using a cell phone to finish up a bit of work on the way home, he's mentally "there" and physically "here" on the train. The trouble is, his thoughts and voice are most distinctly "here" for all other commuters to hear!
My local paper carries a weekly column of anecdotes about New York City life sent in by residents and tourists. Lately, I've often noticed stories concerning cell phones on buses. (They don't yet work on the subway.) One day, a reader told how a caller loudly phoned home to ask if her family wanted salmon or chicken for supper that night. Not long into the conversation, an irritated bus rider shouted "Salmon!", prompting other passengers to take up the cry, "Salmon! Salmon! Salmon!" Unconsciously or not, the riders were yanking this woman back into the physical context of her call-the bus-and reminding her that her actions affected them too.
The mom on the hayride talked so discreetly that her calls may have escaped the notice of most other parents. Yet she was entangling herself in two social situations as well. During her calls, part of her remained with her daughter, part of her stayed accessible to work. If she hadn't taken the cell phone, she would have had to miss the field trip, or miss work to go on the outing. But is partly being there good enough, for either her child or her work? That's a tough question. I have a cell phone, and I once took it along while shepherding my daughter to a friend's birthday party. To my horror, the business call I was waiting for came through while I was in the bathroom. I literally had to pull up my pants, run out of the room with the ringing phone, and feign normalcy as I answered. While glad that I caught the call, I can't say that I was "all there" during the party, before, during, or even after my conversation.
I've never made a phone call on a bus, but I used to call friends while walking to and from the bus stop, feeling gleeful that I could slip in a social call during this "dead time." I don't do that anymore. During the call, too many unpredictables occurred, leading me to cut short the calls. Or I'd get to my front door and hurriedly end the chat so I could see my children. I began to think, why call friends at times when I expect them to adhere to my circumstances?
The cell phone makes so many of our activities portable, which is good. But being divided between two places puts us in two contexts. We don't like to think of it that way. We assume that we may freely choose between the two situations, tuning out one while attending to the other and vice versa. Yet we are involved in both situations, and we run the risk of being fair to no one, not even ourselves. During my calls on my walks home, I seemed to be usually the one who got to choose whether my "here" or their "there" mattered more. I wanted others to be accessible to me, although I wasn't always comfortable being accessible to others.
Nowadays as I walk home from the bus stop, I turn off my cell phone and let my mind wander. As I amble along beside Central Park, I try to notice the pastel colors of the sky at sunset, or the phase of the rising moon, or the hurried gait of my fellow commuters. I find that the "here" and "there" of my body and my mental wanderings no longer clash
