(ITD5b) Work, Play, Display II: Exploring the Shifting Landscape of Time, Media, and Technology in Post-Pandemic Society

This session welcomes inquiries into the intertwined narratives of work, leisure, media, time, and technology, notably against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to explore the shifting digital landscape where the boundaries between work, leisure, and social connections have been redrawn. This session aims to spark discussions on the contemporary challenges and transformations in the post-pandemic world, setting a platform for future explorations. We anticipate engaging contributions that dissect the complex interplay of media, technology, work, and leisure, shedding light on the evolving social dynamics in these uncertain times. Tags: Equality and Inequality, Technology, Work And Professions

Organizers: Spencer Huesken, Queen’s University, Christian De Vrij, Queen’s University; Chairs: Spencer Huesken, Queen’s University, Christian De Vrij, Queen’s University

Presentations

Danielle Thompson, University of Waterloo

Rethinking Assumptions about Workplace Surveillance: A survey on the use of employee monitoring applications in Canada

Employee monitoring applications (EMAs) are software tools that provide employers with the capacity to monitor employee behaviours through features such as email monitoring, time tracking, location tracking, keystroke logging, and camera and screen captures, among numerous other functionalities. EMAs have become increasingly affordable and accessible on the open market, and their adoption by Canadian companies increased significantly since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the shift toward remote work (Capterra, 2022; Thompson and Molnar, 2023). While marketed as beneficial for managing a dispersed workforce, the use of EMAs to monitor remote workers raises significant concerns about privacy and human rights, given their powerful surveillance capabilities and ability to collect vast troves of sensitive information that blur the division between workplace and personal activities. The use of EMAs for remote work monitoring increases the urgency of examining technology-facilitated surveillance in Canadian workplaces; yet relatively few studies have explored the patterns of EMA usages within Ontario. In light of these concerns, we sought to examine the extent to which EMAs are being adopted by Canadian companies and the ways in which they are used. Specifically, we wondered: (1) How do rises in remote work influence EMA adoption and use? (2) How do company objectives (e.g., cybersecurity, productivity, wellness) influence the adoption of EMAs? And (3) Are companies concerned about the potential harms of digital workplace surveillance and how does this influence EMA use? To answer these questions, we conducted a survey of 402 managers/supervisors (71.6%), executives/owners (22.6%), and partners/co-owners (5.7%) in companies across Ontario (60%), British Columbia (30%), and Quebec (10%). In order to gain insight into the relationship between remote work and EMA use, we included industries that were selected based on their high capacity for remote work (as identified by Statistics Canada) (e.g., education, finance, insurance etc.) and required participants to have knowledge of their companies remote working policies. Our findings suggest remote work options and the use of EMAs to be more prevalent in large companies (500+ employees) in comparison to those with a small workforce (less than 10 employees). However, following the onset of the pandemic, we see a spike in the amount of medium size companies (50-99 employees) using EMAs, suggesting that many companies who did not view monitoring technologies as necessary for workforce management prior to the pandemic, supported its adoption thereafter. While the connection between remote work and EMA use is not surprising, Canadian companies continue to use EMAs even though a recent StatsCan report (2024) notes a significant decrease in the percentage of Canadian workers that are working from home. While remote working rates have not returned to pre-Covid levels, we have seen a decline from 40% in April of 2020 to 30% in January of 2022 (Statistics Canada, 2024); yet, our findings suggest that EMA use remains high, with over half of our sample (51.7%) indicating that their company currently used EMAs at the time of our survey (January 19 - February 2, 2022). As such, we argue remote work management has served as a justification for the adoption of EMAs but suggest that digital workplace surveillance has permeated into non-remote management alongside the shift from entirely remote working during the pandemic to hybrid or in-person working arrangements thereafter. Additionally, we argue that while remote work management drove the adoption of EMAs for many companies, company objectives such as cybersecurity and productivity secure the continued use of these softwares. In fact, the desire for companies to achieve objectives like increasing profit (62.69%) appears to outweigh concerns about the harms these technologies produce (e.g., erosion of trust). Overall, our findings raise important concerns regarding the frequently mistaken compromises that managers accept when choosing to use EMAs. Specifically, managers assume that a slight loss of employee trust is counterbalanced by clear gains in productivity and cybersecurity, when, according to scholarly research and our own original research using computer science methods to assess the security and privacy vulnerabilities in the applications themselves, the opposite may well occur.

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Non-presenting author: Adam Molnar, University of Waterloo

Michael Christensen, Carleton University

The Health Hustle: Theorizing Health Misinformation and Influencer Culture on Short-Form Video Platforms

Studies of health misinformation on social media have proliferated in recent years and many of these studies have recently identified short-form video platforms, such as TikTok, Instagram, and to some extent, YouTube, as the most popular sources of this material. This paper examines this genre of video content to understand how influencers develop a form of credibility that allows them to build followings despite sharing misleading or inaccurate health claims. By examining health influencers who are well-known to traffic in questionable health information, the paper raises important theoretical questions about how researchers should evaluate this content. While many articles published in health-related journals quickly dismiss health misinformation as pathological – and some of the advice in these videos can certainly lead to serious health problems – the popularity of the genre points to an underlying cultural phenomenon that makes this content interesting and meaningful to many people. The paper argues that one way this content resonates is through the language of hustle. As scholars of influencer culture have pointed out, the vast majority of influencers engage in a type of aspirational labour that sees them produce content for these platforms for free with the hope of monetizing their brand in the future. At a time when public disinvestment in health care institutions has made access to good health care more precarious, people have had to become experts in their own individualized health. Framed in this way, it is less surprising that narratives about struggle, hope, and empowerment might make specious health claims more attractive.

Martin Hand, Queen's University; Milana Leskovac, Queen's University

Pandemic Temporalities: Media Narratives of Temporal Crisis and the 'New Normal'

The sociotechnical, economic, and cultural disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have often been discussed in terms of a temporal crisis. For individuals, disruptions to routines precipitated feelings of boredom, ‘un-cannyness’ (Aho 2020), an ‘ungraspable’ and ‘odd’ sense of pandemic time, including a loss of purpose through a fundamental disruption of duration and temporal order (Verhage et al. 2021). Scholars have articulated the relatively common lockdown experience of engaging in continual digital streaming for work or leisure in terms of ‘suspended waiting’ (Ruse 2022), ‘dismal regularity’ (Shields et al. 2020), or ‘quarantime’ (Irons 2020), with many struggling to transform this into ‘normal’, ‘productive’, or ‘capitalist’ time (Suckert 2022) and avoid perpetual ‘doomscrolling’ (Ytre-Arne and Moe 2021). While these general feelings of disruption are well-documented, there has been no research looking at the specific role of media narratives in organizing and reinforcing these forms of ‘temporal crisis’. This paper is part of a larger project about how and in what ways established temporalities have been mediated, disrupted, and reconfigured in Canadian Society. Specifically, we report on one broad aim: to understand the dominant narratives, expectations, and normative conceptions of pandemic related temporal change in the Canadian context through two interrelated planes – legacy media narratives and social media accounts. This work is framed through interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the ambivalent yet constitutive roles that media play in the composition of temporalities (Gregg 2018; Keightley 2019; Wajcman 2019a), theorizations of time that take a polytemporal approach, emphasizing both the uneven distribution of temporal autonomies (Baraitser 2017; Sharma 2014) and the multiple ways that time is socially structured, differentiated and experienced (Jordheim and Ytreberg 2021; Rosa 2019).  To analyze dominant media narratives of the ‘new normal’ in temporal terms, we draw on two sets of preliminary media data. First, content analyses of 80 major Canadian news outlet editorials and articles between March 2020 to May 2022 to provide data on the dominant imaginaries, moralities, and expectations of temporal change constituting a generalized narrative of the ‘new normal’. We discuss how key accounts of temporal disintegration, dissonance, and management actually shifted over this period, between ‘slowing down’ and ‘speeding up’, and between temporal ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity’. Second, to understand how some of those narratives were actually engaged with at the level of routine disruptions and adaptations, we focus on individual accounts of changes in ‘temporal autonomies’. Drawing from 502 comments collected from the subreddit r/Toronto – shared between April 2020 and December 2021 - we discuss how sudden changes to temporal autonomy were differentially ‘felt’, as related to the normative use of discretionary time and changes in work routines. We highlight how age, family composition, socioeconomic and health status, geographical location, and the temporal span of the phenomenon shaped these engagements and the differentiated negotiations of them. In considering these two thematic analyses together, we draw tentative conclusions concerning the multiple and variable roles that media played in shaping temporal expectations and experiences. First, common narratives of and knowledge about pandemic disruption and the ‘new normal’ were circulated and engaged within mainstream media. However, as these narratives interacted with individuals’ social location, as well as beliefs about the risk of the virus and the effectiveness of government policies, they produced a range of experiences and attitudes towards the suite of pandemic temporal changes. These ranged from beliefs in collective sacrifice and individual responsibility in controlling the spread of infection, fatigue and hopelessness in enduring the phenomenon, to defiance and non-compliance to pandemic rules. Second, digital media were often promoted and used as the primary means to rapidly re-synchronize routines (schooling, working) at the individual level, but in so doing, they appeared to further contribute to an increasingly pervasive disruption of boundaries between public/private domains. Finally, we observe how different forms of media are used dynamically to shape temporalities, and that individuals negotiate their lived realities with dominant narratives about temporal change to produce beliefs and attitudes about the effect of the pandemic on their autonomy.

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Non-presenting author: Daniela Zuzunaga Zegarra, Queen's University