Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day
Craig Lambert
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1619027364
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations. It has slipped into our routines stealthily; most of us do not realize how much of it we are already doing, even as we pump our own gas, scan and bag our own groceries, execute our own stock trades, and build our own unassembled furniture. But its presence is unmistakable, and its effects far-reaching.
Fueled by the twin forces of technology and skyrocketing personnel costs, shadow work has taken a foothold in our society. Lambert terms its prevalence as “middle-class serfdom,” and examines its sources in the invasion of robotics, the democratization of expertise, and new demands on individuals at all levels of society. The end result? A more personalized form of consumption, a great social leveling (pedigrees don’t help with shadow work!), and the weakening of communities as robotics reduce daily human interaction.
Shadow Work offers a field guide to this new phenomenon. It shines a light on these trends now so prevalent in our daily lives and, more importantly, offers valuable insight into how to counter their effects. It will be essential reading to anyone seeking to understand how their day got so full—and how to deal with the ubiquitous shadow work that surrounds them.
pedagogical goofs or by creating an anxious atmosphere around schoolwork that paralyzes the young student. Shadow work can cut both ways. Interestingly, it turns out that parental participation in children’s education, from homework to Parent Teacher Association meetings, does not help kids’ academic performance, and may even hinder it. The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement with Children’s Education (2014), by sociologists Keith Robinson of the University of Texas and Angel L. Harris of Duke
triggering upheavals throughout the economy, from home repair to tourism to accounting to higher education. The skill set that humans bring to projects now depends less on memorized data—less on facts, or pure information. In the twenty-first century, we need human brains to do things that computers and the Internet cannot do. In particular, people are good at discovering relationships between facts. The modern expert’s skill is recognizing patterns. For this, artificial intelligence cannot equal
bumper stickers, patients may respect their physicians but no longer revere them. This humanizes doctors and to some extent relieves them of the burden of having to seem flawless and omniscient. Doctors are people, too. Yet the deconsecration of the medical office also places physician and patient on a more equal footing. It sets the stage for medical shadow work: patients taking on prerogatives, actions, and responsibilities once restricted to physicians. A doctor friend has on his wall a
and dissection of data sets whose size exceeds the capacities of standard software tools. Technology can now collect and store files measured in terabytes (1,000 gigabytes) and petabytes (1,000 terabytes). But gigantic databases or even skyrocketing computational power isn’t the real magic of Big Data. The sorcery involves, in part, linking huge data sets together for a synergistic payoff. And algorithms, those step-by-step rules for making a calculation, distill meaning from these heaps of
In contrast, credit and debit transactions are thoroughly recorded and traceable. All this documentation, whether by cookies on a server or a video surveillance camera in a convenience store, moves much of what we do from the private to the public realm. Living under surveillance has some social benefits. When terrorists bombed the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013, melting into the crowd before their bombs exploded, one of my first thoughts was, “How are they ever going to catch these