It’s pretty common to hear particular technologies presented as being either for dudes (i.e., srs bsns gadgets) or for girls (think messaging apps and anything related to shopping). It’s also common to see technologies adopted by female consumers as either fluffy or some quasi-miraculous sign of alien life—see every early article about Pinterest.
Forget that for a second, though. Here’s another way to think about the relationship between women and technology: Consider this post from Cyborgology (part of the Society Pages, a collection of blogs run by the University of Minnesota’s sociology department), which asks what happens to “femininity” when technology encroaches on many of the tasks traditionally considered the work of women and minorities.
The post was spurred by an Atlantic essay suggesting we’ve entered an exhausting age of hyperemployment. Short version: Much middle-class work has metastasized to the point we’re essentially on call 24/7. Email itself is a second job, ditto tasks like calendar invites. Then there’s a sea of personal correspondence, like fundraising emails and notices from your kid’s school and junk mail and so on.
Meanwhile we spend our “free” time in places like Facebook, and what’s that but another a job? We’re just generating more data points for Zuck and Co. to sell ads around. “Hyperemployment offers a subtly different way to characterize all the tiny effort we contribute to Facebook and Instagram and the like. It’s not just that we’ve been duped into contributing free value to technology companies (although that’s also true), but that we’ve tacitly agreed to work unpaid jobs for all these companies,” the Atlantic suggests.
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