There are lots of VERY GOOD reasons why business people are jumping on the social-media bandwagon. I’m not going to rabbit on about those, but rather touch on something subtle I’ve noticed throughout the last year about social media and how it changes the nature of business relationships.
I’ve had many discussions over the years with friends about how some people have “work self” and “home self” and tend to keep them separate. Some people have a work persona that they use to keep focused on tasks, be professional and protect their personal lives from privacy intrusions. Let’s face it, not every workplace is a happy sort of place. However, I think that the separation of work from home persona is damaging to the spirit (oh yes, it gets flakier). Allow me to rant…
During the Industrial Revolution, the nature of work changed dramatically. Instead of the days of cottage industries and guilds, when a person’s livelihood was inextricable from their life itself, the Industrial Revolution saw masses of people going to work in factories, completing repetitive and often mindless tasks, and then returning home with the day’s wages. Their work was foreign to their family – it was just something that sent home a father/husband/son who was worn-out and often resentful about “the system.” The design of workplaces became about mechanization, treating people as “human resources” – little more than cogs in wheels. As the 20th Century wore on, factory jobs became a way of life for the lower and middle classes. Even if you didn’t technically work IN a factory, your input during the day was viewed as part of an overall mechanized force for production. Then automation came along and hands-on tasks were taken away from people, replaced with a robot’s switches or a computer keyboard. “Work” became, for many people, a euphemism for sitting on your ass all day and trying to keep your supervisor happy.
Who would NOT want to put on a false persona, tuck away their quirky sense of humour to fit in, avoid notice, get promoted? As the human soul – which thrives on interaction – and the human body – which thrives on motion – became more and more disconnected from work, companies had to start paying people more and more to compensate them for the time they were spending at work. We started seeing factory jobs paying $20, $30 or more an hour for a mindless task – and then we started complaining that productivity was dropping. Our economy is full of inefficient, lazy workers! The Japanese are doing it so much better!* We need to analyze, incentivize, manage change! People started moving other people’s CHEESE! And again… the work-persona became a highly useful scheme for keeping oneself “in line” and shutter one’s true awareness of the utter mindlessness of the daily grind.
Okay… have I painted a nasty enough picture? A little over the top? Oh good. Now let me talk about what social media does to break down this nasty construct of WORK.
Social media allows people to find out about their co-workers (and colleagues, and clients) home lives. The integration of our communication with friends and our communication with work helps people to see the whole, integrated nature of others in their circles. A prospective client is no longer just a target to be wooed, seduced, or maybe bamboozled. He/she is now a parent with adorable children, who plays tennis as a passion. You can learn things that, especially as an independent worker, you might not have a chance to learn about the people around you in the business community.
Maybe it’s not going to change the mechanized, cog-in-a-wheel mentality of the workplace. Not all by itself, at least. There is enough of a hue and cry about work/life balance that I can see we’re heading into a whole new era… what comes after the Industrial Revolution? What is work going to look like when we each do something that uses our unique talents, appeals to our primary interests, gives us food for thought and helps us feel like a whole person? One could mention that not all jobs can be fulfilling like this: who wants to be a garbage truck driver? MY SON DOES actually. He’s two now, but if I can raise him to maintain a curiosity about the world and avoid developing biases towards white-collar work, maybe he’ll be the sanitation engineer of the year in 2037. And in fact, it does seem like a great job – you get to know a neighborhood, work with pretty darn nifty technology, and keep the world clean. In between stops he can post Twitter updates about the coolest recyclable thing he’s picked up all day.
I admit this is probably just a fantasy of mine, but if social media can break down some of those barriers we erect between who we are at work and who we are at home, I think we all stand a lot better chance of building a future that is interesting and humanistic instead of mechanized and drab.
Update: The ASTERISK! I forgot the asterisk! It was to remind myself about the topic of productivity, specifically whether/why the Japanese are so much more productive than North Americans. To sum up, because this is already a long post full of preposterous ranting, from what I have read the Japanese culture is much less oriented towards individualism than North American culture and more particularly, United States culture. When they go to work, they don’t need to be taught that “there’s no I in team” – unlike North/Americans they already believe in the strength of working in groups. Children in North America are raised to be “independent” and “think for themselves” and yet historically our workplaces have rewarded exactly the opposite behavior. People worry when young children are “too attached” to their parents or don’t have any personal ambition or drive, yet expect those children to grow up and become one of a thousand happy cubicle dwellers. And you wonder why movies like Waydowntown get made? Good movie, by the way.
Tags: people, social media
