- cross-posted to:
- quitterreddit@jlai.lu
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- quitterreddit@jlai.lu
- fediverse@lemmy.world
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
I think you misunderstand my position. I’m not a cultural pessimist saying social media made us all into mindless zombies. You can use social media very actively by putting much thought into your posts and conversations and researching them thoroughly. And there is alot of stuff you can mindlessly consume at home long before the internet.
What I’m saying is that Bullshit Jobs created a whole new demographic with time on their hand to idly use online (since they work on computers) but not enough to be productive. As I wrote in another comment, in the time between meetings when a mail might come in or your boss might bump into you, a social media timeline is the way to go. You don’t have a TV in office but access to the internet.
No, the actual definition that Graeber uses for bullshit jobs is not relevant for this discussion. Corporate Lawyers are his classic example, but those are jobs that don’t have a ton of idle time. Other jobs, like night security guard or condo doorman, are by no means recent inventions, and exactly the type of people who used to pass the time with radio and magazines.
If you’re saying that there’s a rise in idle time for people, I’m not sure it comes from our jobs.
You are right that not all Bullshit Jobs have the idle time I’m talking about but enough to create this culture. But I can’t say it better than he himself:
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 2018 (p. 382 of 895 in my ebook version)
I’ll be honest: I found David Graeber to be way off the mark in this book (and only kinda off the mark in Debt, the book that put him on the map). Setting aside his completely unworkable definition of what makes a job “bullshit” or not, it still doesn’t make a persuasive case that our social media activity is driven by idle downtime on the job.
The majority of the time that people are spending on Facebook YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are happening off the clock. It’s people listening to podcasts in the car, watching YouTube videos on the bus, surfing Facebook and Instagram while they wait for their table at a restaurant, sitting at home with the vast Internet at their disposal from their couch, etc. And perhaps most importantly, it’s a lot of younger people who don’t have jobs at all.
So the social media activity is largely driven by people who aren’t working at that moment: commuting times in mornings and evenings, lunch breaks, etc. that’s not the bullshitness of the job, but the reality that people have downtime outside of work, especially immediately before or after.