fieldus

My love-hate relationship with working in offices | Technology | The Guardian

What technology has changed is the speed and density of the links that bind external workers into the social mesh of the office. The mixture of email, instant messaging, texting and just plain telephone calls mean that a mid-range mobile phone now offers much more computing power for journalistic purposes than the entire resources of a national newspaper could 10 years ago - and I can put it in my pocket. Laptops are nicer to read and write on, but this is still an astonishing development. If all that journalism needed were technology, then everyone in the western world could be a journalist now.

Yet there is still one huge advantage to offices which working at home can never approach. Just as you generate your own efficiencies at home, so do you generate your own inefficiencies: all the perfections of my software and hardware are the result of hours spent not writing. In an office, there are politics and gossip. Outside it, you have to make your own entertainment, but this is as easy as opening a new browser window. There is a law of the conservation of busywork that operates all across the universe. So it does not matter that we could now in principle work more efficiently on a desert island than in the most modern and impersonal office. In the end, technology can never supply the pressure towards productivity supplied by a room full of fellow workers, all apparently busy - even if they are just emailing gossip and YouTube links to one another.

The pressure towards productivity… hmmm some truth to that, but I think it’s more than a question of environment. Motivation, interest, meaning, habit. They all play a part.