Time Bind Tech
Anil Dash has written a great reflection on how and why Amazon Echo and Alexa “matter” in modern households. He makes several points, more than one of which is generative, but I am most interested in who is talking about Echo Alexa, who isn’t, and why that might be.
My sense of Dash from social media is that he is a modern dad. And, on Twitter, several other seemingly modern dads chimed in with anecdotes about how the dads in their social circle really dig Echo/Alexa (I’m now going to switch to just saying Alexa because this is annoying and nothing is lost if I do).
Dash also observes that the Silicon Valley elites don’t seem to be nearly as excited about Alexa as they are about virtual reality. He points out that Alexa is in more hands of regular people. And, outside the SV bubble, tech commentariat seem to appreciate what that might mean. (An aside, my working class little sister recently texted me a photo of herself in VR glasses. I just felt like sharing).
How can we make sense of how Alexa has diffused while simultaneously being undervalued among some tech communities? I’ll take a stab here at a plausible theory. According to all the feedback to Dash’s story so far, Alexa is great for families. Alexa isn’t just great for families but it is great for the particular conditions of modern families. For example, Alexa can order your paper towels:
Even though Amazon made the service, and it’s great at performing Dash button-style tasks like “reorder paper towels”, all of Amazon’s commerce and retail capabilities feel like just one tiny part of what an Echo can do.
Don’t laugh. Paper towels matter.
Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochshild said that modern post-war families navigated the effects of globalization by “outsourcing” the “second shift” of managing the household to working mothers/wives. The second shift has gone on to become one of those great terms, in part because there is so much evidence suggesting that it is true for many families. The second shift is not only the housework but managing the emotional binds of complex family and social relationships. Wives and mothers buy the paper towels after working their first shift paid jobs. But, they also remember the birthdays and call their in-laws and build the family’s social ties. The second shift is hard.
The second shift is so hard that it becomes a landmine for family stability and well-being. Hochshild writes that she:
examined the tensions that arise at home in two-job marriages when working women also do the lion’s share of the childcare and housework. Such marriages were far less strained, I found, when men committed themselves to sharing what I came to call “the second shift,” the care of children and home. But even with the work shared out, there seemed to be less and less time for the second shift, not to mention relaxed family life.
The relaxed family life.
Dash says Alexa is great, in part, because:
Being hands-free matters. Whether it’s asking Alexa about the weather while getting dressed, or telling it to set a timer while putting something in the oven, not requiring your hands and your eyes fundamentally changes when a device can be used. It turns out there are a lot of times when our hands and eyes are otherwise occupied.
When our hands and eyes are so occupied that we cannot stop to set the timer that disciplines our second shift labor, chances are great that we’re not exactly living the relaxed family life.
Alexa might be popular with regular people because regular people have less control of their first shift lives, more risks associated with failing at their second shift lives, and fewer resources to outsource either shift to cheaper labor. I suspect those things are not true for Silicon Valley elite to the extent that is true for well-paid tech workers outside that culture.
If Alexa’s appeal is due in large part to its utlity in managing families, its no wonder that elites aren’t very interested in it. Here, too, though Dash offers an interesting commentary of how that might change (or, not). Dash says “Dads love Alexa”.
One of the great debates around family, the social institution, is that gender parity cannot be achieved unless men are held as responsible for managing the second shift as are women. And, data show that many men are making that shift. It’s not yet a staggering number. It’s not a tipping point. But there’s maybe enough data for social scientists to agree that its a nascent trend: some men are becoming more involved in the critical minutiae of the second shift.
Maybe Dads love Alexa because Dads are suddenly as responsible for ordering the paper towels as Moms.
This wouldn’t be the first time that household tech was pegged to structural changes in how our family lives work. When women entered the workforce in large numbers, technology like frozen meals and microwaves followed. Lauren Gust at MIT is fun on this. From Gust’s “Defrosting Dinner”:
Routinizing the second shift through technology has a history. And that history is very gendered (and classed and raced, by the way. Who can afford Alexa? And who has the tech acumen for the learning curve? And who wouldn’t be judged for spending money on Alexa and not spending money on pants that don’t sag or whatever the cultural signifier is for poor, brown non-elite people these days?)
Hochshild pointed out that tools are symbols of leisure we wish we had, imagine we will have, worry that we’ll never have again:
John points out in passing an expensive electric saw and drill set he bought two years earlier with the thought of building a tree house for Cassie, a bigger hutch for her rabbit Max, and a guest room for visiting friends. “I have the tools,” John confides. “I just don’t have the time to use them.” Once, those tools must have represented the promise of future projects. Now they seemed to be there in place of the projects. Along with the tools, perhaps John has tried to purchase the illusion of leisure they seemed to imply.
Alexa may be sexier than a drill but the dreams seem to be the same. An extra set of hands. Timers that make the second shift as efficient as the first. Outsourced, cheap labor to order the paper towels that reduce friction in household tasks. Children who can manage their own social domains by using voice commands. It’s seductive and probably very necessary. More necessary than virtual reality but then that may be why the latter is considered more exciting.
For those of us into the social side of technology and especially into inequality, it is interesting to think about a technological utility for managing families being pegged to men’s evolution as opposed to women’s. It’s still early, but imagine a future where we can write a version of this pictorial history of white middle class women and household technology but its as much about dads as it is about moms.
